Podzinger -- Searches for phrases within podcasts

[Bob Russell]

With the rise of podcasting comes a few bumps in the road, just like any new technology. We are all finding that the best podcasts are great and the rest, well, you might have to really like the topic to make it worth your while.

Because of the time involved in listening to a podcast, one often wishes that you could just zip to the part where they talk about your favorite topic. One way to do that is to look at a table of contents published along with a podcast... many very thoughtful podcast creators supply a list of topics and the time each topic starts.

But now there's another way to jump to content you desire. Using the Podzinger search engine, you can find exactly where your phrase is located in any of its indexed podcasts. From the official site, "PODZINGER is a podcast search engine that lets you search the full audio of podcasts just like you search for any other information on the web...PODZINGER creates a text index of the audio data, using the industry's leading speech-to-text technology from BBN Technologies, to enable search within a podcast, not just within the metadata." Only English language MP3 or WAV files are currently supported.

And if you are a podcast publisher, you can not only add yourself to the indexed podcasts for general searches, but you can also provide your listeners a search capability limited to your own podcasts.

(via ToDoOrElse)

[sUnShInE]

I dunno if it works very well. I just did a search for a friend who definitely has a very highly regarded podcast and it didn't even find one instance of her name. I'm dubious.

Sounds good in theory though.

[Bob Russell]

She may need to enroll her podcast. (Or maybe you are allowed to enroll for her?!)

But I'm sure there are limits to the completeness and accuracy. They do say that for enrolled podcasts, they are expecting to index within a day. Actually, I think they said within something like 8hrs.