Podzinger is Pretty Impressive

One of my complaints about podcasts is that you can’t search them easily. It looks like Podzinger is solving that problem:

Podcasts have been subjected to the same primitive search through categorization … until now. PODZINGER looks inside podcasts, not just the metadata, letting you search podcasts in the same way that you search for anything else on the web.

When you type in a word or terms, PODZINGER not only finds the relevant podcasts, but also highlights the segment of the audio in which they occurred. By clicking anywhere on the results, the audio will begin to play just where you clicked. There are also controls that let you back up, pause, or forward through the podcast. Or you can download the entire podcast.

Sounds great, but does it work? Kind of. As a test, I went in search of the term ‘perl’ (the programming language), knowing that I’d recently published a session on QA Podcast about perl testing. Here are the results on Podzinger. It found the podcast successfully, and to its credit it’s apparently able to differentiate between ‘perl’ and ‘pearl’ (presumably using context). Truth be told, its transcription leaves something to be desired. Here’s the section it cited:

in the conflict as tasting programs that are written in perl or he can be used as scripting language to to write scripts This script For programs that are written in another

Mind you, that’s transcribing an accented English speaker on a fuzzy phone line. Here’s what the text actually is:

In the context of testing programs that are written in perl, or it can be used as a scripting language to write scripts, test scripts, for programs that are written in other languages.

Clearly Podzinger isn’t perfect, but they’re on their way. Just imagine the big companies lining up with blank cheques to buy these guys.