Annotation of digital recordings in humanities research still is, to a large extend, a process that is performed manually. This paper describes the first pattern recognition based software components developed in the AVATecH project and their integration in the annotation tool ELAN. AVATecH (Advancing Video/Audio Technology in Humanities Research) is a project that involves two Max Planck Institutes (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle) and two Fraunhofer Institutes (Fraunhofer-Institut f