Radio World reports that there is a new search engine designed for audio, called Audioburst. “Our system’s core technology listens in real-time to online sources of audio content, and processes it on two levels,” said Assaf Gad, Audioburst’s vice president of marketing and strategic partnerships. “In the first level, the audio is fully transcribed to text using our ASR (automatic speech recognition) software engine. This text then goes through our NLP (natural language processing) algorithm: It allows us to understand what is being said, and to use this information to categorize, classify and store each topic for online searching.” Audio becomes text, which is simpler for searching, and then that text search reappears to the user as audio. While text and video have been easily shared and searched for years, audio is more inscrutable, and the computing technology to search live audio was not available until now. Whether the mass public wants to search for audio or not is still an open question, there are certain audio aficionados who will certainly be testing Audioburst.