Microsoft Azure now uses speech recognition to help users search videos

Summary:

Microsoft Azure now provides a speech-recognition service for audio-visual content that indexes the files based on what’s actually said in them. This could automate the searchability, categorization and description of content that used to be a mystery if it wasn’t properly labeled.

 

Microsoft is putting its speech-recognition expertise into action on its Azure cloud platform with a new service that lets users index and search their audio and visual files based on the words that are spoken in them. The new service, called the Microsoft Azure Media Services Indexer, is the materialization of a Microsoft Research project called MAVIS.

The way the indexer works is to listen to a user’s content and extract keywords as metadata, which can then be used for a variety of things. Search is the probably the most obvious one, but the metadata could also be used to categorize content or, Microsoft claims, add descriptions or captions to it. This will help people discover content and gain a sense of what’s in it, but will also help content creators bring some order to their digital libraries and possibly make more money off of them as they start matching ads to keywords and concepts.

While the resulting indexes aren’t particularly high-tech as far as database applications go, the speech recognition capabilities are based on deep learning — the same set of techniques that power the upcoming real-time translation feature in Microsoft’s Skype application. Assuming the Azure indexing service is English-only right now, Microsoft’s work in translating languages would seem to support the idea of it expanding across languages at some point.

Original post: http://gigaom.com/2014/09/10/microsoft-azure-now-uses-speech-recognition-to-help-users-search-audio-visual-content/