ConvoCast Selects blinkx to Power Audience-Generated Content and Conversation

Blinkx today announced a technology partnership with ConvoCast, the provider of a voice-enabled platform that lets broadcast and print media companies improve audience participation and interaction.

Through the partnership, blinkx will provide its patented speech recognition and audio search technology to ConvoCast for use with its Audience Engagement Platform, which includes the AudienceVox application for radio and television and the ReaderVox application for print media. The Audience Engagement Platform provides a digital audio posting feature that lets listeners speak their minds, using their voices to express opinions, debate, collaborate, share, and create additional content around the original real-time broadcast content.

blinkx’s technology will also be integrated into the application to capture the spoken audio, convert it to text, and post it to the Web That content can then be indexed and searched, giving show listeners and others the ability to look for and respond to specific content that interested them, even days or weeks after the original broadcast.

Though the technology being offered through this partnership can work with any broadcast material, it is geared mostly for talk radio where listener interaction, either through a telephone call to the studio or through other means like email, text message or online chat, often drives the on-air conversation, says Matthew Service, chief financial officer of blinkx.

"It’s about driving consumer discussion about the original broadcast," he explains. "It’s about extending the audience interaction, Previously, a consumer could only participate in the broadcast if he was listening at the time. This captures those broadcasts for those not engaged in the live broadcast."

ConvoCast, and the media outlets that employ its services, "need to pull in listeners who are calling into a broadcast, take their comments, and put them into a format that can be viewed on the Web," Service adds.

Today, blinkx has indexed more than 26 million hours of audio, video, viral, and TV content, and made it fully searchable and available on demand. This latest partnership with ConvoCast "provides the ability for traditional media companies to expand their offerings to the Internet space," Service says. "What we’re really doing is creating a distribution outlet for radio and TV on the Internet."