Podzinger is just what I was looking for! Podzinger uses speech recognition technologies to actually try and figure out the words in a podcast and then helps us to search within podcasts! Although not quite 100% accurate, it is quite impressive.
This can actually be used in a number of ways:
* Just search for keywords the way you do a normal search and get the podcasts of your choice. Podzinger actually provides RSS alerts for these keywords and so you get podcasts on the fly delivered to your favorite reader.
* I had recently written about the Problems with podcasts, where I had mentioned:
…there is an inherent problem with podcasts. They are not searchable. A typical podcast, for example, Slashdot Review contains many different news items. In this example, Slashdot review contains all the important stories published in Slashdot in that day.
In RSS, suppose I am not interested in reading a particular news item, I can just skip and read the next one.
Podzinger helps us with this.
Usually podcast publishers provide you with a description, which tells you what the podcast contains. Just use this to search in Podzinger and you can magically be transferred to the exact location where that particular item starts.
One problem however: Podzinger works only with IE 5.0+ with RealPlayer. (However for the sake of using this utility you can definitely go back and use that browser. 🙂 )
If you care about podcasts, you definitely should give it a try!
