// Blog
Clarify provides audio & video search by API
Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.
For two years we built and sold call recording systems. Behind those systems we developed an audio search engine. So many people wanted access to that search engine that we realized it was more important than anything else we were doing.
So, a little over nine months ago we decided to stop selling recording systems, and make the search engine available to any developer through a self-service API.
Nine months is a long time, and it’s not. It entirely depends on your perspective.
My sister-in-law just had a baby. I spent the weekend at her house eight months ago. Seems like yesterday. From my perspective, my new nephew just appeared. From my sister-in-law’s, it was a long, unpleasant slog.
A lot can happen in nine months. Nine months to birth a baby. Nine months to build and release a brand new product.
I don’t want to compare the process of building software to the process of having a baby. It’s been done. And they’re really pretty different.
I’m not interested in the length of time it’s taken us to get here. I’m interested in the insignificance of that time compared to a larger context.
Nine months is less than 1% of an average human life. It’s a smaller fraction of the average company’s life.
Six-hundred years is 0.3% of humanity’s existence. As I pointed out in my last blog post, six-hundred years is the length of the Gutenberg Pause, the period of time during which human knowledge was primarily stored as text instead of speech. Now that that period is coming to an end, speech will once again predominate. Speech, of course, is our natural form of communication.
Before looking at why this is happening, we need to understand why the written word took speech’s place after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. These are the most important reasons:
- Books last longer than brains.
- Books don’t forget.
- Books are easy to transport.
- Books are easily reproduced.
How else is text superior to voice? It can be manipulated as data. We can easily process and change it. Those tools have been around since the advent of computing. We haven’t been able to do that with audio. But that’s changing quickly. Very quickly.
Books are still being printed, but most text is now stored digitally. Audio is also stored digitally. As the price of storage continues to fall, the difference in cost of storing the same words as text or audio becomes insignificant.
Today, Clarify’s speech and audio processing platform comes out of beta and enters production. Clarify’s API makes it easy to search any media file. We make searching a phone call as easy as searching a written transcript of a phone call. This isn’t just a clever application. It’s functionality we’re making available to any developer via an API. Anyone can now embed this functionality into their apps. With a few lines of code, a previously impenetrable media library can be searched as easily as a library of text files.
This is a big deal. It’s the beginning of the end of the Gutenberg Pause. We are returning to the oral transmission and storage of information. Audio files now have the same attributes as text files: they don’t deteriorate, they are easy to transport, they are easy to reproduce, and they can be searched and accessed randomly.
But audio files also have many attributes that text files don’t. They are full of emotion and nuance that words alone can’t convey. They contain the identity of the speaker, music, and other sounds that can’t be translated into words. They are so superior that text will soon seem quaint and, eventually, disappear.
The Gutenberg Pause has been wonderful. It enabled unprecedented growth and prosperity. For that, we’re thankful. But moving beyond words is very exciting. Human communication will certainly improve, and so will our ability to extract information and understanding from this communication.
At Clarify, we’re proud to be contributing to this transition, and we’re looking forward to seeing what developers create on top of the building blocks we are making available today.