Google launches GAudio – Google Audio Indexing

18 September, 2008 (21:01) | Google, Video, Video SEO | By: Kieran Hawe

A couple months ago Google launched their “Google Elections Video Search” gadget on iGoogle. This gadget took NPR type video content (clearly spoken words) from YouTube’s politicians channels and transcribed it into indexable form via speech-to-text technology. This week Google took this technology and made it more accessible to the public by launching GAudi (Google Audio Indexing) within Google Labs.

GAudi is still in the experimental phase but it offers a glimpse as to what is to come for video search and the possibilities this brings for Video SEO. Speech-to-text offers video content publishers the opportunity to blow out video landing pages with relevant and keyword rich content. For example: take an episode of Mad Men that is being shown on AMCTV.com – using a speech-to-text technology (when transcripts are not available) would provide that page with a significant amount of relevant content that is indexable by search engine spiders. Logic can also be applied to this content to make the text automatically added to the meta data as well. The opportunity to drive organic search engine traffic through these types of Video SEO methods is enormous.

An interesting point in all the GAudio talks is that GOOG-411, Google’s directory assistance service, is the technology that made the Google Audio Indexing possible or a least better. Back in late 2007, when GOOG-411 launched, Google said that it would be using the acquired service to improve speech-to-text technology…guess that worked out for them.