I recently heard of two web services that seem to represent a giant leap forward for internet technology. The first is Podzinger, which uses sophisticated speech-recognition to read spoken-word content and make it searchable. Let’s say you were driving home last week and you remember hearing Samuel L. Jackson talking about his upcoming movie Snakes on a Plane. You’d like to find that interview, so you head over to Podzinger and type:

NPR samuel jackson snakes on a plane

That search takes you here, where the NPR story is the second one on the page (NPR Movies), and if you look at the text (which isn’t 100 percent accurate) you can easily see that the relevant conversation begins at 25:48. You can click the icon next to it and begin listening at that very point.

Podzinger does for audio and video what Google does for text (and if it does well, I’m confident that Podzinger will soon be part of Google or Yahoo).

If you’re interested in the technical aspects of Podzinger, you can listen to that here.

The other groundbreaking service is Riya, a place to store your photos. That’s been done before, but get this: Once you upload enough of your pictures and train Riya, it uses facial recognition technology to identify the people in your photos and make them searchable. If you have a couple thousand pictures on Riya, it can find the 25 of Uncle Fred. It can also read text within photos too (on signs, etc.)