A joint venture between the Japanese government and a private company today launched VOISER. Voiser is a voice recognition search engine which indexes video and other multimedia. When you arrive at the home page the site presents a voice recognition search function. Press the search key and speak into the mic. It then translates your spoken word into a digital signature. It then uses this digital signature to search through its index and return relevant results. The results that it returns are able to be sourced from almost any content.

The search engine reportedly has the ability to index the sound of a video or podcast. Couple this with the indexing of normal text files found on the web and the search possibilities just increased hugely.

Here is the link to the press release
http://www.aist.go.jp/aist_j/press_release/pr2008/pr20081008/pr20081008.html

http://www.voiser.jp/