1. In association with stored data derived from recorded speech of one or more human speakers, a method for locating specified speech content included in the stored data, wherein said method comprises the steps of: converting an audio file into a corresponding text file, wherein said audio file comprises particular content of said recorded speech in an audio form, and said text file comprises said particular content of said recorded speech in a textual form, said text file being divided into multiple text segments that are each provided with a unique identifier; constructing a searchable index comprising a number of index elements from said text file, each of said index elements being associated with particular information located in one or more of said text segments; searching said index elements of said searchable index with one or more specified search arguments, in order to detect one or more text segments of said text file that each respectively contains at least some of said specified speech content; and using the identifiers of respective detected text segments to locate said specified speech content in said audio file, wherein said audio file comprises multiple audio segments, each audio segment containing data corresponding to the data of a corresponding text segment, each audio segment being identifiable by the identifier of the corresponding text segment, said stored data including said audio file is in a digitized and compressed form, and specified content contained in a given one of said audio segments is retrieved by decompressing said given audio segment of said compressed audio file, while other portions of said audio file remain compressed.