Bringing Video out of the SEO Cold

I thought the interview on Fast Company TV with the head of Everyzing.com http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/putting-better-data-into-video heralded a really massive jump in search technology. As far as I understand it (and I haven't interviewed or worked with Everyzing myself), they take video and use very advanced speech-to-text technology and natural speech analytics to 100% automatically parse the verbal content of a video. Each occurrence of a term gets a time code in the video. Then Everyzing put it all into an index of search-able tags and publish on their website for Google and other search engine crawlers to find. They already do it for Fox and other major news providers.

Their new interface allows people to search for a term in a video which will be highlighted on the associated time-line running below the film. You can then highlight the clip on the time-line that you want to copy, add a comment and send a link to the copied clip extract with your comment to friends, or post on a social networking site. Adds massive new dimensions and possibilities to viral campaigns.

And next year a self-service version will be available that will allow anyone to put up  indexed video on their own website or blog - either paid for, or supported by shared ad revenue - and apparently you can do your own ad deals too.

Apart from being brilliant for finding video content (ever tried to find a video that's moved off its bookmarked page with search terms?) it'll also make editing videos with a fairly high speech content much easier. None of that laborious time code spotting before editing your corporate video masterpiece.

But the real fun is in putting speech on a par with the written word. People aren't used to that - just think of all the care that goes into drafting text, compared with most recorded interviews. We apparently only take in 7% of the spoken word when we watch someone. The rest is body language, tonality etc. I suspect that many spokespeople and politicians have been relying on that for years!

Effectively, speech to text performs a charm or a charisma-ectomy. I'm not saying that's always a good thing, but there will be a lot more of the "did he really say that" searches and commenting going on as competitors seek to score points. And the gaffs will linger in the memory caches to haunt aspiring hopefuls. But it's manna from heaven for satirical TV shows.

Toastmasters, PR people who specialize in developing clear messages for clients, plus presentation/communications skills trainers could be in for a field day as spokespeople up their game for the new 'everyzing on the record' era.

PR will never be the same again!