It is estimated that 300 million people use Google every day in
their quest to find information on the web. Imagine having the
ability to not only search online text files for specific words
but also to search audio files for specific sounds. Thanks in
part to Messiah College Engineering Professor Randy Fish, that
technology is now patented. Fish and a team of five others have
spent the past seven years perfecting and patenting “audio hot
spotting,” a search engine technology that allows users to
search audio files for a specific word or phrase, a particular
speaker, a speaker’s tone, or characteristics like laughter and
applause. This type of “audio hot spotting” might, for example,
be helpful to a user who only wants to hear the portions of a
speech that caused an audience to react with applause or
laughter. The challenge, according to Fish, was developing the
artificial intelligence algorithms able to discern emotion in a
voice, regardless of whether the voice is male or female, and to
recognize applause a