Google gets political - Reading the candidates' statements will just be that bit more painful

By Copper Harding @ Wednesday, July 16, 2008 4:51 PM

Section - PCs/Internet

Google continues to tap into the political sphere within the US by launching a service to let users make donations to candidates.

Google Checkout for Politicians is a clever idea, in the sense that it standardises much of what is needed for reporting and compliance. With a fee of twenty cents per transaction, that seems pretty reasonable. The aggregate, however, is sure to put a few more dollars in Google's pockets.

Now Google is adding additional features to its political repertoire by offering speech-to-text integration to its YouTube Political Channel . While the service is currently available only for that channel, it would seem an expansion is likely in the future as the company fine-tunes the process of speech recognition and indexing, which is still imperfect. This seems like an interesting offering if it could be expanded to additional videos. It is currently only a gadget that can be added to your Igoogle page, meaning that you must have a Google account to use it.

A short test demonstrated that yes, you can find your representative being stupid on any number of topics. There are a few misses, but in general it's a surprisingly decent integration. Dare we say that this actually makes watching our politicians more entertaining? Let the cutting and remixing begin in earnest. X