VOICE/AUDIO INFORMATION RETRIEVAL: MINIMIZING THE NEED FOR HUMAN EARS Mark Clements(1) and Marsal Gavald(2) (1)Georgia Institute of Technology and (2)Nexidia, Inc. Atlanta, Georgia, USA This paper discusses the challenges of building information retrieval applications that operate on large amounts of voice/audio data. Various problems and issues are presented along with proposed solutions. A set of techniques based on a phonetic keyword spotting approach is presented, together with examples of concrete applications that solve real-life problems. Index Term-- Phonetic search, speech recognition, information retrieval