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I used to work for a company that built Speech Recognition systems and I came up with a similar/related idea - the idea being to take a load of videos of barack

I used to work for a company that built Speech Recognition systems and I came up with a similar/related idea - the idea being to take a load of videos of barack obama (for example), and create an accurate 'voice print'. Once done, any videos or speech could be scanned and if Barack Obama's voice print was recognized/detected, the recognizer could be tuned to his voice print AND could apply a set of appropriate grammars/vocabluary (for example the 'politics' grammar, or 'american' grammar or 'economics' grammar) - then you could very accurately perform speech recognition and automatically create text translations. Then when you google for text, you could actually retrieve videos whose content exactly matches the search terms and jump directly to that part of the video. Over time you could build up a database of voice prints and grammars for not just celebrities, policitians, but also criminals (for automatic identification). I had this idea almost 4 years ago, submitted it to the company, but it wasn't taken seriously. If anybody is interested in this, let me know!

josefresco 15y ago
Execute the idea for yourself. Good ideas are a dime-a-dozen.
- amirmc 15y ago
  Off-topic: I understand your point but I've come to realise that good ideas are not a 'dime-a-dozen'. Mediocre ideas, maybe (although telling them apart is not necessarily obvious).
  - sycren 15y ago
    I would also say that with this particular idea, I have no idea whether you could data mine films and other media without having to pay some hefty licence fees that may perturb startups without enough funding.
    - chc 15y ago
      I don't believe there's any laws that would mandate this, at least in America. As long as you're merely analyzing legitimately acquired content, I don't see how anybody else has any say in what you're doing. Copyright isn't an absolute control over what can and can't be done with your work — it's just a right to restrict reproduction.
amirmc 15y ago
> when you google for text, you could actually retrieve videos whose content exactly matches the search terms and jump directly to that part of the video The search aspect of this is very interesting and I hadn't thought of it before (though in hindsight it seems like an obvious benefit).
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- etcet 15y ago
  I hacked up a python script to do this on my film collection. It was before mplayer2 so I could only track to keyframes. It was janky but kinda cool to search for a word (say "love") and see a bunch of clips with that word in it. The problem is that subtitles rarely have proper grammar and it's very hard to isolate full phrases.
nvictor 15y ago
i'm interested.
- sycren 15y ago
  I would be interested in what you might come up with
  - tcarnell 15y ago
    The problem with implementing this idea is which technology would actually have to be built, and in which technology the real value would lie. Once the technology is established, scanning videos, tv, radio etc for any source of spoken audio and building up a database of indexable dialogs would almost be the easy part. Building a speech reconizer is not only difficult, it has also been attempted many times before and unless a speech recognition guru could bring something new to the world, the best we could do is what is already available - so probably best to use existing technology, which often is not cheap to get a license. This is also true with voice print technologies. The key to getting this up and running lies in finding or building a really good speech recognizer and voice print generator/varifier... Maybe this is something Y Combinator would be interested in funding? I am based in Europe (Spain at the moment) and I think it would be really hard to convince people to fund this type of technology over here. If anybody is up for the challenge, I'd love to be involved!
molloye 15y ago
Google is doing something comparable with Google Voice and Search recognition transcriptions, inviting corrections both manually and by using similar techniques to spell correct in text search. I suspect a lack of data is the biggest challenge in improving speech recognition
molloye 15y ago
Google is doing something comparable with Google Voice and Search recognition transcriptions, inviting corrections both manually and by using similar techniques to spell correct in text search. I suspect a lack of data is not the biggest challenge in improving speech recognition

josefresco 15y ago

Execute the idea for yourself. Good ideas are a dime-a-dozen.

amirmc 15y ago
Off-topic: I understand your point but I've come to realise that good ideas are not a 'dime-a-dozen'. Mediocre ideas, maybe (although telling them apart is not necessarily obvious).
- sycren 15y ago
  I would also say that with this particular idea, I have no idea whether you could data mine films and other media without having to pay some hefty licence fees that may perturb startups without enough funding.
  - chc 15y ago
    I don't believe there's any laws that would mandate this, at least in America. As long as you're merely analyzing legitimately acquired content, I don't see how anybody else has any say in what you're doing. Copyright isn't an absolute control over what can and can't be done with your work — it's just a right to restrict reproduction.

amirmc 15y ago

> when you google for text, you could actually retrieve videos whose content exactly matches the search terms and jump directly to that part of the video The search aspect of this is very interesting and I hadn't thought of it before (though in hindsight it seems like an obvious benefit).

deleted 15y ago
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deleted 15y ago
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etcet 15y ago
I hacked up a python script to do this on my film collection. It was before mplayer2 so I could only track to keyframes. It was janky but kinda cool to search for a word (say "love") and see a bunch of clips with that word in it. The problem is that subtitles rarely have proper grammar and it's very hard to isolate full phrases.

nvictor 15y ago

i'm interested.

sycren 15y ago
I would be interested in what you might come up with
- tcarnell 15y ago
  The problem with implementing this idea is which technology would actually have to be built, and in which technology the real value would lie. Once the technology is established, scanning videos, tv, radio etc for any source of spoken audio and building up a database of indexable dialogs would almost be the easy part. Building a speech reconizer is not only difficult, it has also been attempted many times before and unless a speech recognition guru could bring something new to the world, the best we could do is what is already available - so probably best to use existing technology, which often is not cheap to get a license. This is also true with voice print technologies. The key to getting this up and running lies in finding or building a really good speech recognizer and voice print generator/varifier... Maybe this is something Y Combinator would be interested in funding? I am based in Europe (Spain at the moment) and I think it would be really hard to convince people to fund this type of technology over here. If anybody is up for the challenge, I'd love to be involved!

molloye 15y ago

Google is doing something comparable with Google Voice and Search recognition transcriptions, inviting corrections both manually and by using similar techniques to spell correct in text search. I suspect a lack of data is the biggest challenge in improving speech recognition

molloye 15y ago

Google is doing something comparable with Google Voice and Search recognition transcriptions, inviting corrections both manually and by using similar techniques to spell correct in text search. I suspect a lack of data is not the biggest challenge in improving speech recognition