re: Keyword spotting

Drew Lanham — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:04:07 GMT

I can agree a single word may not necessarily be representative of the content of a discussion. In our experience, however, the spoken word -- when looked at holistically -- can be an excellent indicator of content and context. To be clear, Nexidia is not proposing using a single word as an indictor of the appropriate ads to run. In the video example, our technology has categorized the content (without the benefit of tags or metadata), determined the frequency of the word and the relationship to other words in time (e.g. camcorder within 10 seconds of video and or home movie). Once content and context have been refined, this information is then passed to the ad server in order to be combined with other information (demographics, geography, search history, etc..) to allow the ad server to serve the highest value advertisement to the user at that point in time. The timing of the word was to illustrate accuracy but also that we could control timing of the ad to correspond with the content to increase frequency of the ad or ads. The timing and frequency of the ad is important because it isn’t intrusive to the experience (e.g. frontroll ad), so there is no harm to the user in it being changed throughout playback.

Nexidia is not just word spotting, we are rendering the spoken word content fully searchable in over 33 languages. Our technology is used to render tens of thousands of hours of audio content searchable every day in call centers, legal, media and government applications. We add an analytics layer on this capability to extract actionable knowledge from this otherwise unusable volume of unstructured data. Using a single, dual core dual processor box, we index audio or video searchable at 340 faster than real time. This equates to 8,000 hours of content per day per box. As a result of this kind of efficiency, the cost of the infrastructure is not a barrier to getting started experimenting in the promising spaces of media search, categorization and contextual ad targeting in audio and video.