51¶¯Âþ

Historians studying the Nazi Holocaust will soon have sophisticated voice
recognition software to help them. The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History
Foundation has collected 51,000 video testimonies in a range of East European
languages. Many of the people testifying had strong local accents, sometimes
made stronger by the emotion of recalling past horrors. This made it difficult
to find software that could pick out keywords. Now experts at Johns Hopkins
University, IBM and the University of Maryland are working to design a search
engine that can link different people’s testimonies to key events and
places.