Making Czech Historical Radio Archive Accessible and Searchable for Wide Public

In this paper we describe a complex software platform that is being developed for the automatic transcription and indexation of the Czech Radio archive of spoken documents. The archive contains more than 100.000 hours of audio recordings covering almost ninety years of public broadcasting in the Czech Republic and former Czechoslovakia. The platform is based on modern speech processing technology and includes modules for speech, speaker and language recognition, and tools for multimodal information retrieval. The aim of the project supported by the Czech Ministry of Culture is to make the archive accessible and searchable both for researchers as well as for wide public. After the first project’s year, the key modules have been already implemented and tested on a 27.400-hour subset of the archive. A web-based full-text search engine allows for the demonstration of the project’s current state.