PodZinger is out of beta. If you enjoy podcasts, you will want to take a look. And if you are interested in the latest search technology you will deffinitely be interested.

There are many excellent podcast search engines out there. What makes PodZinger different is that the technology does not rely on meta data alone to categorize the podcasts. PodZinger turns podcasts into text and then indexes it. In this way you can search the entire podcast.

The audio is transformed into text with the help of Speech recognition technology from PodZinger’s partner, BBN Technologies.

When you do a search, PodZinger finds the relevant podcasts and also highlights the segment of the audio in which your search term occurred. And it gets better: By clicking anywhere on the results, the audio will begin to play just where you clicked.

Each item in the search results has controls that let you back up, pause, or forward through the podcast. Or you can download the entire podcast if you decide it’s what you are after.

I tend to loose my patience rather quickly when rummaging through long podcasts, and PodZinger just made my day.