Does anyone know of commercially-available software that can search audio files or streams for specific words?

April 20, 2009 10:00 AM

Does anyone know of commercially-available software that can search audio files or streams for specific words?

Sure, governments apparently have the ability to listen automatically to a massive number of phone conversations and isolate any that mention key phrases. But when you've got as much money as you need for a project, anything's possible. Is there anything available, however limited, for consumers that will do anything similar? I'm looking for something that will search an audio file or stream and pinpoint any use of a short phrase or particular word combination.

(And before anyone asks, no this is not for nefarious or illegal purposes in any way.)

There was a thread here about a company that built devices able to detect the noise of spray cans, meant to alert police to graffiti artists. That's about as close as I've been able to find myself.

posted by GhostintheMachine to Technology (2 answers total)

Best answer: Adobe Premier Speech Search does this, though it's inside a video editing suite, so you'd be doing it in a rather roundabout way.
posted by niles at 10:11 AM on April 20, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestion. Maybe as a less expensive option I'll try running Dragon or some other speech-to-text program and search the text file... not exactly an elegant solution but it should work.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 7:18 AM on April 21, 2009