US Patent 7809568 Indexing and searching speech with text meta-data

An index for searching spoken documents having speech data and text meta-data is created by obtaining probabilities of occurrence of words and positional information of the words of the speech data and combining it with at least positional information of the words in the text meta-data. A single index can be created because the speech data and the text meta-data are treated the same and considered only different categories.