Are you talking to me?

ALEX CASTRO has been patient. Ever since his teenage years, when he volunteered to work on speech-recognition projects during an internship at AT&T Bell Labs, Mr Castro has been waiting for the technology to work well enough to become widely adopted. "I always felt that voice recognition was a technology that would someday be applied to mainstream uses," he says. While waiting for "someday" to arrive, the 32-year-old had time to finish his college degree, earn a Masters at Cornell, do a stint at Microsoft's MSN Entertainment business and oversee the launch of Amazon's Mechanical Turk online marketplace. Now Mr Castro has finally started his own firm, called Pluggd, a podcast directory with a nifty audio search-engine that can search audio clips (and the soundtracks of video clips) for keywords, using speech-recognition technology.