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Full-Text Audio Search
Captain Chad writes "The latest print edition (12/16/2002) of InfoWorld has an interesting article about an audio search program by Fast-Talk Communications. (The article is not yet available on the InfoWorld web site, but the Fast-Talk site has some good info, including a downloadable trial version.) The product works by breaking the audio stream into phonemes, which are the 'basic units of sound in a language.' The search is then performed for a specific sequence of phonemes. This method is faster and far superior to traditional audio searches which convert to text and then perform a normal text search. The author of the Infoworld article, Jon Udell, tried a variety of searches that were surpisingly successful. If this technology is as good as he claims, there is a reasonable chance it will revolutionize the way we store data. Maybe there will even be an 'Audio' tab on Google." Here's the Infoworld article.
Let's see, given 5000 billion dial equipment minutes in 2001, we'd have around 150 trillion seconds of conversations. Assuming you could code everything at a bitrate of 8kbps, this would mean roughly 150 terabytes of compressed data for 2001 alone. Presumably the storage would be distributed at the switches where you record the conversations. So the problem is now to compress, transcribe, index, search, decompress, and access 150 terabytes of distributed storage.
And keep in mind that doing a phoneme transcription rather than full-blown speech-to-text is likely to generate a whole lot of nonsense transcriptions, precisely because you don't have any guiding information from the words in the conversation.
While I enjoy Popular Paranoia as much as the next guy, the whole TIA thing does not really get to me. My reaction is mostly: bring it on, if you really think you can convince yourself that it can be done.
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