Feb 1, 2004 12:00 PM,

Seth Murray, President, StreamSage

Ed Gubbins

Searchable text may be one of the handiest inventions of the short-attention-span society: Find what you want, skip the rest. (Still reading this? Good.) But audio and video content, because it's digested in real time, is harder to scan, thus we still have to endure all 30-plus minutes of a Webcast just to get the three-minute slice that concerns us.

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Enter StreamSage, whose software listens to audio (and video) content for search and retrieval purposes. Whereas competitors mimic the old text-search approach, taking you right to the word you're looking for (or 10 seconds before it), StreamSage can excise all the content (and only the content) that pertains to the topic of interest using a science called computational linguistics. In other words, the software cannily knows when a speaker has changed the subject.

“The system has built up this tremendously large understanding of how topics are related to each other,” said Seth Murray, StreamSage's 28-year-old president. “It's read years and years of the New York Times, medical text books, journal articles. So if you're doing a search on the Knicks, it knows Patrick Ewing and basketball are all related to that.”

NASA and Harvard Medical School use StreamSage for their lectures. National Public Radio uses it for their program archives. But although Murray has spoken briefly with wireless carrier execs who are considering their own content delivery initiatives, none have become customers yet. Though the Washington, D.C., startup hasn't targeted the mobile industry yet, Murray sees vast possibilities for commercial and consumer uses there. For example, if people could use their cell phones to scan the news for topics of interest, they could improve their drive-time news experience while eating up more mobile minutes. Over time, StreamSage could learn what subjects interest each user and tailor their content accordingly. (Think of it as TiVo for your cell phone.)

“That's the brilliance of the system,” Murray said. Unlike most of us, “it really listens.”