Jason Snell: The Dream of Converting Podcasts into Text: "While... machine translations aren’t readable, they are getting good enough to fuel search engines. A great proof of concept is this one from David Smith...
...which covers seven different podcasts. I’m a little baffled why Google hasn’t just indexed the contents of every podcast on the Internet and poured it into the Google search engine. David’s engine works well because the computerized transcript is attached to a time code for that podcast episode, so when you find a search result you can click to hear what was really said, rather than relying on a baffling transcript. This could go a long way to addressing the searchability of podcasts, which is why I’m hoping to (slowly) add automatic transcripts to all my podcasts. They won’t be great reading—which is why in the long term this technology needs to get much better in order to support people who are unable to listen at all—but they will help feed search engines and make it easier to find that moment when I first had Matt Fraction’s “Hawkeye” recommended to me...
#shouldread
#strongai
