The article focuses on transcribing speech and making it ready for browsing by explaining the Rough'n'Ready prototype system under development at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, that aims to provide a practical means of access to information contained in spoken language from audio and video sources. It creates a Rough summarization of speech that is Ready for browsing. The summarization, a structural representation of the content in spoken language that is very powerful and flexible as an index for content-based information management, includes extracted features such as names of people, places and organizations mentioned in the transcript as well as identities and locations of speakers in the recording. The system also breaks the continuous stream of words into passages that are thematically coherent. Each of these passages is automatically summarized with a short list of appropriate topic labels drawn from thousands of possibilities. Taken together, these capabilities effectively impose a document model upon spoken language.