Tag Archives: Search

Introducing Tweepz

logoDuring the last couple of weeks, I’ve been spending some evening-hours on a new project called Tweepz. It actually started when I noticed that it is rather difficult to find people on twitter which might be interesting to follow. Twitter’s own usersearch only allows to search by name and another similar initiative twitdir has been down for quite a while already. Thanks to my job @ exalead I have the opportunity to develop upon a pretty powerful search engine, so I started crawling twitter.

The first version is now ready (although there might be some bugs here and there), it’s available on www.tweepz.com.

Besides performing a regular search, you can also use a couple of operators in order to restrict the search to a specific field (bio:, name: and loc:). Next to these operators, you can perform fuzzy queries using spellslike: and soundslike: or by using a wildcard *. Think I’ll add an advanced search window later this week, that should make it a bit easier to perform advanced queries.

Currently around 400.000 twitter profiles have been indexed so there’re still a lot to collect by the crawler. If you are twittering, you can speed up the indexation of your own profile by following @tweepz.

Hope you’ll find it a handy tool, suggestions or feature requests are of course welcome!

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Searching through video’s with speech-to-text

Speech recognition is one of those technologies which has been around for quite a while, but has not yet found it’s way to large-scale utilization in the industry. Yes, we’ve probably all talked to a computer of the airline reservation center once in our live, but I wouldn’t call that real speech recognition. You will have to choose between a couple of words, and if you say something different, they will redirect you to one of the choices anyway. This is what we call a small vocabulary speech recognition application. It is useful (I guess) but not what I think the best use case of speech technology.

The main problem researchers are facing is that each person’s style of speech is very different. And, especially if more people are in the same conversation, the speech recognition technology should be able to deal with all those different styles and vocabularies. I don’t expect it to take many more years before technology will be able to deal with those complications but there is some good news already!  Continue reading

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