I’ve posted before about PodZinger, BBN Technologies‘ podcast search engine incorporating advanced speech recognition technologies. Think of it as Padova on steroids.
Well, here’s a interview from Amber MacArthur’s Inside the Net (iTunes subscribe link) with Alex Laats, President of BBN’s black-ops sounding ‘BBN Delta’ division. It’s somewhat out of date (published on 29th March 2006), but it’s filled with interesting questions.
The interview covers the genesis of the audio-to-text technology, and some of the user-interface and presentation choices BBN made when creating PodZinger. Laats also touches on some of aspects of their business model: PodZinger as a self-contained product indexes only free-to-download content, but that BBN is actively seeking partnership agreements with Big Content organisations like CNN to come up with search tools for subscriber-only and non-RSS content.
What’s interesting from our point of view is how central RSS is to all of this functionality. Currently, non-RSS and non-free content is hidden from PodZinger. If CNN and the like were to move to an open access RSS publishing model for this subscription content, PodZinger and other harvesting tools would be able to index them, and consequently take advantage of the surge in ‘ears’ that this new way to find content will surely bring.
BBN Technologies, Laats’ company, has an interesting history. From the Wikipedia entry:
Some of BBN’s developments of note in the field of computer networks are the implementation and operation of the ARPANET; the first person-to-person network email sent and the invention of the @ sign in an email address; the first Internet protocol router; the Voice Funnel, an early predecessor of voice over IP; and work on the development of TCP. Other well-known BBN computer-related innovations include the first time-sharing system, the LOGO programming language, the TENEX operating system, the Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT) game, the first link-state routing protocol, and a series of mobile ad-hoc networks starting in the 1970s. BBN also is well-known for its parallel computing systems, including the Pluribus, and the BBN Butterfly computers, which have been used for such tasks as warfare simulation for the U.S. Navy.
