ITGumbo: spicing IT up

Here's a bit of news that I missed when I was going through headlines last week. Last Wednesday, Israel-based Natural Speech Communication Ltd. (NSC), announced in a news release that it "will be launching a multimedia search engine, designed with the capability to recognize spoken words in online multimedia files, as the firm seeks to develop partnerships with content providers." The engine is due out in 2008.

According to the website, NSC is a privately owned company, backed by AudioCodes, Corex Israel Industries, Telrad, and Polar Communication. Lead by its SpeechBlade Server, the company's products are used by such companies as, Cellcom, Bank HaPoalim and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The announcement of a multimedia search engine with voice recognition technology will make it significantly easier for users to find the content they are looking for and will provide media companies with another opportunity to improve their search rankings. This technology also has the ability to give smaller web-based productions more visibility that can provide yet another disruption to the rapidly evolving broadcast world.