Google Gadget Tries To Transcribe What Politicians Say

"I'd like you to vote for me Tuesday and then forget we ever met for 2-6 years." As part of its ongoing effort to promote YouTube as a platform for politics, Google on Monday made a new iGoogle gadget available to help Google users search through election-related video. With the help of speech recognition technologies, Google Elections Video Search will transcribe from speech to text and index videos in YouTube's Politicians channels. Google product managers Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman said, "Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find."