Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Searching Sound

Posted by michael on from the when-grep-isn't-enough dept.

Technology Review has one of their few stories that's not registration-required describing searching audio files for any specified set of sounds. All sorts of interesting applications become possible if you can turn analog audio into a digitally-useful product without massive human intervention.

5 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. When you think about it... by Ieshan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When you think about it, though, government and military agencies must have had this for quite some time.

    Tapping and bugging really does no good unless you've got someone listening all the time - and that's both expensive and impossible. While I realize that someone only has to be listening every time someone makes a phone call with the tapping situation, the outcome is lots more hours of audio then are feasible to search and use.

    If we couldn't have searched audio on a wide scale before, then I find it hard to believe we'd ever be catching anyone by specific phone intercepts. Instead, we'd just be using that sort of thing as evidence.

    I mean, I realize this is a great technology, I just doubt it's as "new" as it seems...

  2. Does that mean... by Valdrax · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...that I can finally find that one song that goes Wagga-chigga wa! Wagga-chigga wa! Wagga-chigga wa-wa! Thoomp! Meedly-meedly-meedly-meedly! Meedly-meedly-meedly-meedly meedly-meedly-meedly-meedly meeeeeeee!!

    --
    If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
  3. Re:Usage scenario by MacroRex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    (paranoia)
    No really, what if they start bugging public places where people talk a lot (bars etc) and run the output through something like this? After acquiring a speech sample from bank/airport/whatever and thus connecting it to a person, it's a breeze to have a global textual log of everything the person says in a public place.

    Of course, the article talks only about deconstructing the audio sample into words, but further analysis is a natural extension of the idea.
    (/paranoia)

  4. Oops, here's a link by madmarcel · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you really want to find out how it works:

    Links to PS and PDF files are on this page

    http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~nzdl/publications/

    (They are not going to like what I am about to do to their server ;)

  5. Index or no index? by Psychic+Burrito · · Score: 3, Insightful
    There's quite a contradiction in this text. First they tell us that FastTalk doesn't uses an "index":

    The key to expediting the process was eliminating the need for transcription or indexing or both.

    Then on the second page, they say that some sort of pre-processing is needed:

    (...) the Fast-Talk approach ?processes the speech in such a way that you can later go back and search it very efficiently (...)

    So I see no revolution here... it's just about indexing the phonemes of a audio stream and then searching these, right?