Tech Blog - Pluggd

I’m a bit slow, I suppose, as I missed this news about a week ago.  “Pluggd is unveiling a major new feature at DEMO this weekend that combines speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search for and skip to parts of an audio file that are related to topics of interest to them.” (techcrunch.com, 10/1/06)
Currently, Pluggd allows users to search the site for podcasts on topics of interest to them. Users can then listen, rate, and share podcasts.

This new feature allows a user to enter a search tag, then listen to all or part of a podcast containing that term. The thing that seperates this speech-recognition feature from similar features offered by other podcasting sites is the analysis of the search tag. Pluggd searches not only for the term, but for related terms. Additional tags can be entered to narrow the search.  The results of the search are then displayed on a timeline, and highlighted in one of three colors, depending on relevance.

Pluggd offers a large variety of podcasts - from a vegan “radio station” to the online diary of Trucker Tom, and this new feature will make it even easier to find a podcast of specific interest.