Searching MIT video Lectures

Researchers at MIT have released a video and audio search tool that solves one of the most challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy academic lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT Lecture Browser website gives the general public detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the university's OpenCourseWare initiative. The search engine leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other institutions to convert audio into text and make it searchable.

The Lecture Browser arrives at a time when more and more universities, including Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley, are posting videos and podcasts of lectures online. While this content is useful, locating specific information within lectures can be difficult, frustrating students who are accustomed to finding what they need in less than a second with Google.