Podzinger somehow transcribes podcasts into text for searching, but does not offer a transcript service. Too bad

http://www.podziner.com

James, I asked this same question on a podcast a few weeks ago and a listener directed me to http://www.podzinger.com, which scans your mp3 and turns it into text. It still has a few shortcomings and will need to improve, but the recognition is about the same as using Word and a microphone. It is not a complete solution, but a good beginning.

I’ve written prototypes and talked with some of the technical architects at MS about speech recognition technology. The current APIs are geared for realtime recognition — dictation — and it’s actually quite difficult to use them in a way that exploits offline CPU power (that is, “I’ll wait 8 hours for the job to finish, if the result is better”).

This is not to say that the task is impossible; it will certainly be achieved someday. With today’s APIs, lower-quality but still valuable work could be done (extraction of keywords and so forth). However, it is a decidedly non-trivial task.

I’ve written prototypes and talked with some of the technical architects at MS about speech recognition technology. The current APIs are geared for realtime recognition — dictation — and it’s actually quite difficult to use them in a way that exploits offline CPU power (that is, “I’ll wait 8 hours for the job to finish, if the result is better”).

This is not to say that the task is impossible; it will certainly be achieved someday. With today’s APIs, lower-quality but still valuable work could be done (extraction of keywords and so forth). However, it is a decidedly non-trivial task.

I’ve written prototypes and talked with some of the technical architects at MS about speech recognition technology. The current APIs are geared for realtime recognition — dictation — and it’s actually quite difficult to use them in a way that exploits offline CPU power (that is, “I’ll wait 8 hours for the job to finish, if the result is better”).

This is not to say that the task is impossible; it will certainly be achieved someday. With today’s APIs, lower-quality but still valuable work could be done (extraction of keywords and so forth). However, it is a decidedly non-trivial task.

I’ve written prototypes and talked with some of the technical architects at MS about speech recognition technology. The current APIs are geared for realtime recognition — dictation — and it’s actually quite difficult to use them in a way that exploits offline CPU power (that is, “I’ll wait 8 hours for the job to finish, if the result is better”).

This is not to say that the task is impossible; it will certainly be achieved someday. With today’s APIs, lower-quality but still valuable work could be done (extraction of keywords and so forth). However, it is a decidedly non-trivial task.

I’ve written prototypes and talked with some of the technical architects at MS about speech recognition technology. The current APIs are geared for realtime recognition — dictation — and it’s actually quite difficult to use them in a way that exploits offline CPU power (that is, “I’ll wait 8 hours for the job to finish, if the result is better”).

This is not to say that the task is impossible; it will certainly be achieved someday. With today’s APIs, lower-quality but still valuable work could be done (extraction of keywords and so forth). However, it is a decidedly non-trivial task.

I’ve been looking at stuff like this for years, from people like Virage and other digital AV transcription services. All of it is expensive, though very cool. I wanted to use it to provide transcripts of digitally recorded Distance Ed classes. Still do, just wish it was cheaper.

Compaq Research had a project called SpeechBot some years ago – it was a search engine for Internet radio shows.

Unfortunately, it seems to be offline now. Read something about it here:
http://www.corante.com/getreal/archives/003865.html

Would also be interested in this – more from a business point of view though.

I work for a market research company – if we could process a recording of an interview through software and come out with a transcript at the other end, that would help us tremendously.

We’ve tried basic speech recognition, but that isn’t accurate enough.

Will watch this with interest. . .

Great idea James.
I have often thought of working on somthing like that with the Microsoft Speach SDK.

http://www.podtranscript.com/index.php?categoryid=13&s=&