Google and Audio

What’s the future of Google and audio?

When you think about, Google has really just been crawling towards the hidden search destination: audio.

Audio is a huge category of media content that in the past has been difficult to index and search for one simple reason: good technology for transcribing audio does not exist. Sure, there have been attempts like Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Jott.

From Google 411 to Google Voice, Google seems to be getting into the big topic of audio. Here are couple of events in the near future:

-Indexing every video’s audio file on YouTube. YouTube is a huge Google sub-company. There is a lot of content on Youtube that is just sitting there, waiting for something. And, with Google’s latest move to provide CC for videos, it seems like searching the audio of videos is just around the bend.

-Perfecting a speech to text conversion tool from data from Google Voice and Google 411. Google Voice and Google 411 are excellent services that use speech to text conversion. Google also has an iPhone app that works as well. All of these inputs can be used by Google to help create the best speech to text tool out there.

-Indexing and converting to text all audio on the net, archive.org, podcasts, all audio in videos, etc. With podcasts, videos and archive.org, being able to index all of the audio on the internet would be a wonderful feather in Google’s cap.

What do you think about the future of Google and audio? Let us know in the comments!

Post by Looming Tech. Find us on Twitter and check out our other blog, Squealing Rat.

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Photo: Junyu Wang

What Google Will Buy

Google. The massive search company. Arguably, the best suite of online services out there. What will Google buy? Read on.

Recently, Eric Schmidt of Google announced that Google would start buying companies again. Here are some of the companies Google will buy.

Dropbox: This is one that I would love to see happen, just because it would make Google Docs so much easier to use. The ideal setup would be that Google would purchase Dropbox, let people continuing using it the way they would, but increase storage capacity, and add functionality that would allow you to sync your documents up to Google Docs. We saw this for Syncplicity, but a Dropbox, Google Docs integration would be amazing.

Drop.io: Drop.io is another one about storage. This would be interesting if Google acquired it because it would indicate another direction Google is heading off in. Maybe Google would go this way, just because it would reach a new audience, and get Google in the storage business. It would be a must have if they acquired Dropbox. Can you imagine a Dropbox, Drop.io, Google Docs integration? Wow, I just blew my own mind.

Jott/reQall/Dial2Do: This acquisition would just be amazing because best use case, Google would integrate with Google Voice. Then integrate with Google Tasks, and suddenly, your whole life is in Google.

Some Kind Of Data Network: This one is a great subject to delve into. I won’t, just because of time, but if Google aquired a data network, I could imagine chaos ensuing. If the FCC approved this move, then Google could dominate the wireless data market, offering free internet in exchange for the use of people’s data. Anti-trust law suits, here we come!

There you have it. Just a couple of guesses to what Google will buy. What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

Post by Looming Tech. Find us on Twitter and check out our other blog, Squealing Rat.

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Photo: Google Logos

A World of (Google) Wave

Google Wave is coming out really, really soon. And by that I mean that Google is releasing 100,000 invites on September 30th.

Now, Google Wave is supposed to be an amazing product. In fact, the hype was so large, that companies started trying to rip it off with quick releases of a imitation. You can even take a look at some of the products, Shareflow and PyGoWave.

But enough with these petty inconveniences. Most people just want to use the real McCoy. And while only a lucky few have a developer invite, (I count myself in this tally) anyone can get an email letting them know the second Google Wave is ready by entering their email here.

Now, on to the information. What is Google Wave? Well, Google Wave is basically a mash up of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Chat and Wikipedia. Described that way, Google Wave sounds like a flop. But taking a look at it from another perspective gives the service new hopes.

Unlike communication platforms like Twitter and Gmail, Google Wave can be hosted on your own servers. That means that even if Google’s servers take a hit and go down, your communications are still up. Another great thing about Wave is its collaboration features. With Wave, you can collaborate on projects and see other’s additions almost instantly.

Another small, but wonderful feature of Wave is the spell check. Unlike regular spellcheckers, Google Wave uses the information collected by billions of Google searches to guess what words you meant to say. For example, if I wrote the sentence “Mary hat a lidle lam,” Google would correctly assume that I meant to say “Mary had a little lamb.” This seemingly insignificant feature may pave the way for better spell checkers.

Mashable put out an article a while back on how Wave will change the web. I really liked two of the subjects it brought up. The article talked about commenting and forums for websites and blogs, a topic I think will hold true when Wave comes out. The other was about customer support.

This idea actually comes from a thread in the Google Wave development preview titled “What Will You Use it For?” It’s a remarkable discussion and brainstorming session over the potential of wave. One of the most fleshed-out ideas in the thread, though, is Wave for customer support. Here are some of the bullet-points for how Wave could be used in customer support:

– Sending trouble tickets
– Incident tracking can be a wave
– Call center analytics gadget
– Distribution list gadget
– Customer meta-data gadget
– Surveys can be a wave

Real-time customer support? Yeah, someone please build that.

Google Wave. The possible future of communications. The only way that Wave will be truly successful if there is widespread adoption of the platform.

What do you think is the future of Google Wave? Let us know in the comments!

Photo: tylerdurden1

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