As Speech Technology reported here a few weeks ago, Google launched a new audio search indexing experiment that allows users to find spoken words inside videos.

Google Audio Indexing (GAUDI) was developed by Google Labs and lets users search for spoken words inside video clips and jump to portions of a video where the searched words are spoken. For now, the GAUDI tool is available only for election videos, but Google plans to expand its use to other videos.

More importantly, GAUDI works well and is pretty fun to use. So, if you want to locate particularly rousing sections of John McCain’s convention speech based on key words or relive Sarah Palin’s sage remarks about lipstick and pit bulls, GAUDI may be the tool for you!

Following up on October’s Overheard/Underheard about celebrity-voiced GPS, we at Speech Technology are happy to announce that readers can now have Knight Rider’s KITT (actor William Daniels) guide their every movement as they drive to the supermarket or to the post office or into the back of a eighteen wheeler to rendezvous with Devon and the rest of the Foundation for Law and Government.

The Mio Knight Rider GPS will be available exclusively at Radio Shack. All in all, that is $269.99 well spent.

If you read yesterday’s story about MIT’s self-navigating wheelchair that uses speech recognition technology to transport users to given locations in response to verbal commands, you may want to check out this short clip of the chair in action.

Click To Play

You may remember last month’s story about Nuance Communications and its “Can’t Stop Stupid Calls” contest, to which service representatives submit their most amusing customer interactions and stories about the strange and terrible calls they’ve received.

Well, thus far, Nuance has received over one hundred bizarre and silly stories, including the following:

• A customer who was installing software onto a computer and jammed all three installation discs into the floppy drive at once.
• A customer who called a bank confused about how an account could be overdrawn if there were still checks left in the check book.
• A customer who was told to open Windows after the computer rebooted and proceeded to put the agent on hold and open the office window.
• A customer who was concerned that a lightweight iPod would get heavier with the addition of files and songs.

Story submissions will be accepted on the official web site through October 6, 2008 and there will be prizes. The story with the most votes wins a $1,000 prize and a $1,000 prize winner will be selected from each of the three judging categories: (1) You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me, (2) Sounds Like Fiction, and (3) Vacation Day Earned.