Apple's new Tiger operating system will debut this Friday, and details are beginning to leak out. One of the most talked about features is called Spotlight, a new search engine built into the operating system. Spotlight will index and search virtually your entire hard drive--emails, PDF files, all word processing files, and "knows" about the file formats of things like images, which can have keywords and subject descriptors attached to them, but could rarely be searched.
But another weblog points to leaked information about Spotlight that is truly a major accomplishment. Apple has supplied a free audio and videoconferencing program for years (iChat) that works remarkably well--I use it all the time to videoconference from my office. With Tiger, iChat will support videoconference meetings of up to four people. That's a significant new feature, but the neat part is this:
"...You're doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type "meeting in San Jose" into Spotlight, and it'll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week's meeting in San Jose."
Although we now have inexpensive tools to digitally record and manipulate audio and video, the dirty little secret is that, like home movies, no one had the time to do anything with them after the recording is made. The ability of Tiger to transcribe the audio from a conference and store the results as searchable text is revolutionary, and will make videoconferences much more useful as archival material.