Audio Search Software

(6-1-04) Search engines try to find their sound. . . StreamSage is starting to make waves with its audio and video search technology, introduced late last year. The Washington, D.C.-based company developed software after roughly three years of research that uses speech recognition technology to transcribe audio and video. It then uses contextual analysis to understand the language and parse the themes of the content. As a result, it can generate a kind of table of contents for the topics discussed in the files. . . . The downfalls of this method are that it can be extremely difficult to be 100 percent accurate. In fact, experts say the language-detection technology is typically only 80 percent accurate. Language hurdles such as accents, jargon and dialect can trip up the technology, for example."

Comment: If your electronic discovery results in voice mail or other audio files this technology may benefit you.