Of all the stories, blogs, mainstream news sources (e.g. Washington Post) concerning Podscope, I have yet to see a single report that does anything other than propagate the company’s own press release. This is wishful thinking.

Sorry to break the news, but automatic analysis of arbitrary podcasts (and similar audio streams) in order to turn audio into indexable text is science fiction. I’ve seen some cool indexing services, e.g. FastTv.com and similar, probably including TVEye’s own products, that are based on related technologies, such as close-captioning (subtitling services for audio-impaired viewers), but this is not the same as automatic audio-to-text.

I’d love to hear from anyone really using such a service ‘in anger’, on arbitrary audio streams, at any sort of scale.

And no, I’m not dignifying any of the sources I’ve scoured with a link. Grrrrrr. A tag below, but that’s it.

Technorati Tags: podcasting, podscope, audio, indexing, automatic

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