Podzinger, a new service that may revolutionize the way we search for podcasts of interest, launched this week.
It uses the same voice recognition technology used by the CIA, but instead of finding bad guys, it helps find good podcasts. By turning speech into searchable text, Podzinger will allow users to perform deeper searches and view results by relevance, much the way Google does for web searches. Once you find a promising podcast, you can listen to it from the search results page or subscribe to the RSS feed.
What the big deal?
Here’s the big deal according to the Podzinger FAQ:
Most podcast search sites provide directories of podcasts by subject, category, or they search only the metadata provided by the creator of the podcast. Podzinger takes search a step further by searching the spoken words inside the podcast in order to find more specific and relevant results. The text-based search results include snippets from the audio to help you figure out if the result is relevant. You can even click on the words to listen to the audio from that point.
But what about music?
Note that the blurb above talks about “spoken words.” I will be curious to see how the search AI distinguishes between speech and the vocals in music tracks. If there’s some way to extract the spoken parts between songs, it would pick up artist names, song titles, etc. That would be truly revolutionary.
Podzinger will be ad-supported, so there’s no charge to use to service. I’ve already submitted my RanchoCasts to Podzinger and will report again once they are available via Podzinger.
Here’s some more discussion on Podzinger from:
TechCrunch
Marketing VOX
Harry Chen
Newsome.Org 