Online video is becoming more and more important. From a search engine optimization standpoint, it can improve your bounce rate, keep people on your site longer, and, if used correctly, greatly improve conversion. The problem with it traditionally has been that it’s hard for search engines to crawl.
Search engines can only read text, so videos, pictures and audio will be invisible unless you do something to help. Google has been working with audio indexing to overcome this problem. It’s an exciting experiment and the initial results look good.
At Google Audio Indexing, thousands of video clips from news organizations have been transcribed. You can find videos by keywords and you can even search within the video. It’s really fun.
But I wonder if Google can apply audio indexing to the entire webiverse of video. In general, the mainstream news media has better diction than the rest of the unwashed masses. I wonder if it’s ready for a broader application. One thing that makes me think it’s not ready is Google Voice, a new service that will transcribe your voice mail for you. Transcribing voice mail is definitely trickier than indexing a news cast. As you can imagine, it doesn’t work as well.
Yesterday, on Reddit, somebody had this fun idea: “Anyone want to help me test the Google Voice transcript capabilities? 614-429-4365 - You leave message and I’ll cut and paste what Google Voice thinks you said in the comments.”
The following is the number one comment. See if you can recognize it:
“now this is the story all about hall my michael sweet turned upside down on i’d like to take a minute just sits right there on i don’t have the i like to come look at what time call bye bye in west philadelphia born and raised on the plane now where i spent most mondays shooting out nice let you know who will students be able to side of the school wanna couple of guys said what up in the good stuff and making traveling monday but i got a lot of fun come on the scanner that said you moving with your again okay bye bye”
