US Patent 8209171 Methods and apparatus relating to searching of spoken audio data

This invention relates to a method of searching spoken audio data for one or more search terms comprising performing a phonetic search of the audio data to identify likely matches to a search term and producing textual data corresponding to a portion of the spoken audio data including a likely match. An embodiment of the method comprises the steps of taking phonetic index data corresponding to the spoken audio data, searching the phonetic index data for likely matches to the search term, wherein when a likely match is detected a portion of the spoken audio data or phonetic index data is selected which includes the likely match and said selected portion of the spoken audio data or phonetic index data is processed using a large vocabulary speech recognizer. The large vocabulary speech recognizer may derive textual data which can be used for further processing or may be used to present a transcript to a user. The present invention therefore combines the benefit of phonetic searching of audio data with the advantages of large vocabulary speech recognition.