NPR brings audio streams to search results
1 June 2004
National Public Radio has begun transcribing audio news streams into text files in a bid to increase digital radio listeners.
The transcriptions have started to appear on Google and Yahoo News, complete with links to source audio file, and NPR claims its visitor numbers have increased in "record spikes" since it began transcribing audio content.
NPR online director Maria Thomas told News.com: "Our site is primarily full of rich audio, and we want people to find it when it's relevant. The big search engines' technologies don't have the ability to get inside the audio or video. With the little bit of text we have on NPR, it's not always good enough to find our content, and reference the page."
Search engine technology is currently reliant on contextual, keyword-related content rather than multimedia content.
Some of the smaller search engines are starting to offer alternative searches. AltaVista now offers audio and video searches, but it crawls the text associated with these multimedia files. A number of web companies are believed to be looking into offering more tailored multimedia searches to users.
NPR is using StreamSage, a speech recognition software, for the transcriptions. StreamSage uses a contextual analyzer that parses the language into themes and generates a text file similar to a table of contents that can be spidered and indexed by search engines. NPR then replaces StreamSage's transcriptions, which can be inaccurate, with a human version.
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