Jason Snell: The Dream of Converting Podcasts into Text: ...

Jason Snell: The Dream of Converting Podcasts into Text: "While... machine translations aren���t readable, they are getting good enough to fuel search engines. A great proof of concept is this one from David Smith...

...which covers seven different podcasts. I���m a little baffled why Google hasn���t just indexed the contents of every podcast on the Internet and poured it into the Google search engine. David���s engine works well because the computerized transcript is attached to a time code for that podcast episode, so when you find a search result you can click to hear what was really said, rather than relying on a baffling transcript. This could go a long way to addressing the searchability of podcasts, which is why I���m hoping to (slowly) add automatic transcripts to all my podcasts. They won���t be great reading���which is why in the long term this technology needs to get much better in order to support people who are unable to listen at all���but they will help feed search engines and make it easier to find that moment when I first had Matt Fraction���s ���Hawkeye��� recommended to me...

#shouldread