[xccx]

A reddit comment on this purchase says this:

  Google tends to look a few steps ahead. 
  Remember that whole debacle with GOOG-411 
  and speech recognition? They intend to use 
  the free GOOG-411 service to improve their 
  speech recognition so that YouTube videos 
  can eventually have automatic closed captioning, 
  and can -- in turn -- be searchable by Google 
  and can offer a whole new era of video search 
  results.

The automatic closed captioning is especially interesting. Any truth to it?

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/97rc8/if_youtube...

[ZeroGravitas]

Part of Google Voice is automated transcription of voice mails.

It's still not perfect, but like close captioning and OCR of books, it doesn't have to be 100% to be useful for search purposes.