What the company is doing is logical -- it is transcribing speech into text, allowing it to be searched. You can now search videos of presidential candidates in order to find a particlar person's thoughts on various matters.
What I find interesting about this initiative is a comment by bloggers who make the following comment:
Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn't yet been completely solved, but we're constantly working to refine our algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results.
This fact that Google is working in the speech rec space shouldn't surprise us as a good deal of the world's information is radio, TV and voicemails. What is unclear is how this technology will manifest itself in other initiatives the company has on the burner.
It is also worth mentioning I met the founder of TVEyes over a year ago and his company is actively transcribing radio and TV already. It is unclear if Google's stepped up presence in this space will be good for smaller competitors or bad. Time will tell.
