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If fast full dictionary speech recognition in any given language, with grid processing and data mining capabilities are being offered commercially, just think what the [insert favorite three-letter-agency here] can do with it.

Instead of can, try are using it.

According to this and this (http://www.callminer.com/investors.html) the connection is as follows: CallMiner -> In-Q-Tel -> CIA.

What it boils down to is that people really have to start to encrypt their communications. Email, phone, carrier pigeons.

Email encryption is a no brainer nowadays. Even the most novice of users can use Skype. And I guess we could make the pigeons look like African swallows, they might go unnoticed.

But fun aside, the snooping capabilities are getting better and better, especially when it comes to keeping tabs on phone communications. If fast full dictionary speech recognition in any given language, with grid processing and data mining capabilities are being offered commercially, just think what the [insert favorite three-letter-agency here] can do with it.

Companies do do a great deal of recording...pretty much every call center I've called in to in the past year had the little "this call may be recorded" message playing. Today the price per gig is down so much that they can record pretty much everything they have going on. And with the advances in speech analytics they don't even need a lot of people to listen to the calls...they can have computers do that as well, speech reco is getting better and better. I just read the other day that Callminer released a grid based recognizer, so now call centers don't even need expensive servers anymore, supposedly they can just use the worker bee's desktops when they're idle. I bet we're gonna hear a lot more of "this call may be recorded" in the future. Hell, I may just do it with my personal calls for fun!

"Thanks for calling, this call may be recorded. Everything you say can and will be used against you when I am calling in favors. Please hold for the next available WhamsterHeel."

if you go to http://www.in-q-tel.org/ you will find the VENTURE CAPITAL arm of the CIA, NSA, FBI and several other TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) Every tech you mentioned in the article is ALREADY being funded and working in the commercial world. This isn't wonderland anymore, this stuff is real and well funded. Check out http://www.callminer.com/ or http://www.agentlogic.com/ if you dont believe me.

http://callminer.com/ CallMiner funded by the CIA... it is out there and works great.

Dont believe this is happening.... check out the CIA (not the NSA's) investor called http://in-q-tel.org/. There are several companies on that list like http://www.callminer.com/that definately can do this and more to calls.

Fast-Talk assumes you know the word you are looking for before you search, which is not super useful, except for google style searches, also it is extraordinarily slow (only searches about 10 hours of audio a second, think about how slow that is for say a year of NPR). Check out CallMiner for a much cooler use of speech to text technology. CallMiner uses trending to find trends in large volumes of calls. a real business use.