The difference is that speech detection is a megabyte problem, while machine vision is a gigabyte problem.

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This has mirrored progress in fields as diverse as speech recognition and credit-card fraud detection, where modern techniques combined with a continuing explosion in computer power have made possible behaviour that seems very like human intelligence, albeit limited to a specific domain.

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Blinkx uses speech recognition, visual analysis and scene change detection, which enable a more accurate search as well as the ability to search within videos for specific words or people.

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