In an recent interview with Charlie Rose, Google VP Marissa Mayer says Google is working on technology that would allow their search engine to recognize and index the audio portions of online videos. Using voice-to-text or voice search technology, Google would be able to index videos using the words spoken audibly throughout the video. She suggests that Google would also like to find a way to index images (which they currently do not or cannot do) but that the technology for video “voice search” could be as near as five years away.

Would that eliminate the need for tags and keywords included with the video? Would the tags or the voice search results be given more weight in the search engine? All questions we’ll have to deal with in the not-too-far distant future.