Google offering political video search based on speech recognition tech

Google has launched the Google Elections Video Search gadget, a new iGoogle/ embeddable widget that combines political videos with Google speech-to-text technology, allowing users to search video by word spoken.

The embedded version above (sized to fit). Type in any word then hit search. In return you are offered any videos that include those words or can pick been Obama and McCain. Within each video the place where the word(s) are mentioned are marked on the playback timeline.

There’s no word from Google as to whether they’ll be rolling this technology out to all hosted videos on YouTube in the future, but the possibilities are amazing. Imagine every online video searchable by the spoken word within that video, and for Google the ability to then serve contextual advertising again it.