So much for Blinkx's much-vaunted video speech transcription...

"YouTube adds speech recogntion

YouTube has just spliced Google Voice’s speech recognition technology into the video captioning process to create a frighteningly powerful mashup: auto captioning. Yup, YouTube now captions your webcam rants for you, so there’s no more mucking around with timestamps. But that’s just the start for what this pairing could do on the world’s biggest video sharing site.

Rolling out in the next few days across a sleek few channels, YouTube’s auto captioning technique scans the soundtrack of a video for words, then chucks the words up on screen in sync, as teletext subtitles do on TV, but without the need for manual transcription.

YouTube readily admits that the captioning is far from perfect at the moment, and we suspect cockerney accents will be its downfall, so has also introduced Auto-timing. Just write out a simple text file with the words, and YouTube will sort out all the timestamps for you so they appear right on cue. This will be available shortly for all English language videos.

That’s just the potential for YouTube’s speech recognition of course. We reckon it’s only a matter of time before it starts being able to detect sentences strung together inside videos to tag them for you and make searches more relevant.

That’s similar to what search engine Blinkx does now, but this could let YouTube provide in-picture links as a clip plays to videos explaining the subject just mentioned. It could also mean more relevant ads, which would aid YouTube in its quest to start making a profit."

from Mirror.co.uk

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Comment: Looks to me like another large piece of Blinkx's USP has just gone down the swanee - and this just a few days after Blinkx music became redundant...

Supporters of Blinkx management will, I suppose, hang on to the hope that maybe Blinkx is somehow involved in this, that maybe Google has licensed Blinkx technology for speech recognition and transcription. Been no announcement to that effect, though, has there? If you ask me it's much more likely that this is yet another boat that Blinxk has missed - and if so, another nail in Chandratillake's coffin...