Audible, who describes itself as the leading provider of spoken entertainment and information on the Internet, is about to launch what is believed to be the world’s first podcast media monitoring service. Audible is believed to be in partnership with an unnamed speech recognition technology vendor – possibly Nuance – to provide one of the first media monitoring services for Web 2.0-style media.
A source from Audible contacted by The Mangle, claimed that “Podcasts and blogs have become increasingly influential in the corporate world, and marketing and PR organisations need to monitor these in much the same way that they have been monitoring the traditional print, radio, TV and online news sources.”
“To date,” continued our source, “no one has come up with a powerful way to monitor, capture information from podcasts – until now. We will be able to monitor and report, and provide alerts to subscibing organisations in the same way that the traditional media monitoring providers have been doing for years.”
Media monitoring is a well-defined and mature service, where organisations provide media monitoring providers with search, subject and keyword criteria to provide alerts and media clips from traditional media sources. Podcasts have proliferated in the last few years, with both existing news and media organisations branching out into this area, and plenty of new players emerging, just as they are in the blogosphere.
The technology underpinning the service is believed to be a combination of a directory listing, asking podcasters to register their podcasts, in a similar way to iTunes, then each podcast is parsed by the speech recognition technology, converted to text and traditional media monitoring undertaken on the output. Audible’s clients will receive a podcast “clip” containing the text, a link to the original podcast for download, number of listeners and information on the podcast from the directory.
