Audio hot spotting is accomplished by specifying query criterion to
include a non-lexical audio cue. The non-lexical audio cue can be, e.g.,
speech rate, laughter, applause, vocal effort, speaker change or any
combination thereof. The query criterion is retrieved from an audio
portion of a file. A segment of the file containing the query criterion
can be provided to a user. The duration of the provided segment can be
specified by the user along with the files to be searched. A list of
detections of the query criterion within the file can also be provided to
the user. Searches can be refined by the query criterion additionally
including a lexical audio-cue. A keyword index of topic terms contained
in the file can also be provided to the user.