Audio podcast search technology

December 10th, 2005 | by Tim Wilson |

A friend and fellow U. of MN grad student pointed me to an article in Wired called Podcast Chaos Be Gone which brought me to Podzinger, an online service that scans audio podcasts and uses speech recognition technology to create transcripts.

I submitted the Savvy Technologist Podcast recently and was informed a few days later that my podcasts had been analyzed and were ready for searching. A quick search for “digital storytelling” brings up my recent podcast with Michael Searson with links to the sections of the podcast where that text was spoken. Pretty cool. Unfortunately, it appears that RealPlayer and IE 5.0 are required to play the clips directly from the search results page. RSS feeds are available for all search results which means that you could subscribe to a feed that should notify you if any particular word or phrase is spoken in any podcast that Podzinger has indexed.

podzinger, speech recognition, savvy technologist podcast

  1. 2 Responses to “Audio podcast search technology”

  2. By Peter on Dec 10, 2005 | Reply

    Can you give more technical details about requirements? Mention of IE 5 indicates a Mac to me and IE 5 isn’t really supported any longer there. Did you test on a variety of platforms?

    I would think that Firefox might work with the right AJAX/Greasemonkey scripting (but I’m not the one to figure that out - my AJAX and javascripting skills are under development).

  3. By Peter on Dec 10, 2005 | Reply

    BTW Tim, I found this post originally at the Ed Tech Insider site and was going to comment there until I ran into a required registration form for just to leave a comment. Geez, it’s Saturday morning, I just got up, give me a break. MPR is doing this too to get to their podcasts. Is this a Minnesota thing? Lucky I saw your ‘Savvy’ link and made it here.

    I do subscribe to you. I’m a colleague at the U of MN (I handle web technologies for the U of M Cancer Center) and I’m in the process of applying for grad school in Learning Tech (formerly Instructional Systems etc. or something like that).

    I enjoy your posts and glad to see someone in K-12 blogging.

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