Google quietly released its GAudi service, a new take on online information retrieval. It uses a remarkably accurate speech recognition engine to extract information from audio and video content and turn it into indexed text that can easily be searched. GAudi is currently limited only to politicians' speeches on YouTube, but Google said it will gradually increase its scope.

Google Audio Indexing (GAudi) is currently available as an experimental Google Labs project with very limited content. Currently only covering political content, Google said that "political videos and election materials are a special case of broadcast news content, a domain that has received a lot of academic and industry attention and is known to perform well." According to the company, the service may help people to better follow the views, actions and platforms of the two presidential candidates?"

"The US election is just a first step," Google said. "We see it as an experiment platform where we can learn what features make the best user experience for people looking for spoken content on the Web." So how does it work? In short: Remarkably well, although it is apparent that GAudi is limited by the weaknesses of today's speech recognition algorithms.

You can read the entire article at TG Daily.