Sylleptic

I saw this site a while back, but it was demonstrated to me again at a meeting with Autonomy this week.

Autonomy do search, and they do it very well from what I’ve seen. The BBC use them, as do the Financial Times and the CIA apparently, so I think we can assume their search solution works well.

What really intrigued me, was that they have the ability to index the speech in videos, in multiple languages. Speech recognition software has been around for many years, but it requires training, and hasn’t really worked to date as a mass market offering. The Star Trek computer that recognises your speech while there’s a massive inter-stellar battle and lots of shouting going on is still some way off.

But the limitations of speech recognition don’t really matter when it comes to search, as it’s fuzzier in its requirements. If it only hears 75% of the words, it probably still works well enough. So Autonomy’s use of speech recognition for search starts to sound pretty interesting.

So here’s the demo: Blinkx. It’s indexing speech in video content all over the world, and providing users with a search interface that’s really very nice. Have a look at this and see if you can figure out what I searched for.

I like this a lot, and I can think of lots of clients who would like it too. We work with Five on their CSI Video Store, for example. Imagine the tool that shows you the episode where the car blew up. Click here to visit Blinkx.