Nexidia Gets in Microsoft’s Video Feedback Loop
Yesterday, Nexidia announced that its Video Search suite of rich media applications would be enabling the video search capabilities of Microsoft Listens, the software giant's internal search provider for its massive storehouse of aggregated customer feedback.
With its thumb in nearly every IT pie, Microsoft has millions of customers around the world and sees a constant tide of feedback from them. It takes feedback in many forms and has been using video at its conferences and in focus group settings for some time. The data gathered from these events, however, was not immediately searchable.
Microsoft was having to laboriously transcribe hours of footage by hand and was leaving most of it unused. The segments that were selected for transcription were done so qualitatively, but weren’t vast enough to be exploited for quantitative statistical analysis. With Video Search, however, Nexidia claims that Microsoft can now search its video feedback within hours of an event where it was captured.
Video Search itself is a collection of services that provide a web search portal on top of Nexidia’s core technologies: phonetic indexing and search engine capabilities. This core tech breaks down rich media recordings into searchable phonemes and creates a true time-aligned index of their audio track. Additionally, it supports many languages worldwide—an obvious benefit to Microsoft, which offers products in many of the languages spoken worldwide, and has at least some penetration just about anywhere anyone can flick a light switch.
Also, appealing to the software giant is the solution’s ability to fit within a pre-existing security system and be installed without any help. One of Nexidia’s main revenue sources has been work for both military and civilian intelligence organizations. To meet those needs, its software has had to be able to function independently of Nexidia.
“[Microsoft] likes it because it is setup tools they can run behind their firewall and run securely….That’s not true of a lot of other speech technology," says Drew Lanham, Nexidia’s senior vice president and general manager. "This is something that they’re literally able to install and configure and run without our assistance. They’re not dictionary-bound or vocabulary-bound.”
The Microsoft deal represents another big step for Nexidia into the enterprise end of rich media video search. It already has contracts with production tools like Avid and expects to announce other major partners in the months to come.