Google Voice – Voicemail Transcription Test
As you may, or may not know, Google purchased the GrandCentral service awhile ago. GrandCentral gave members a free phone number that they could use to ring multiple phones at once, free voicemail, and a number of privacy settings. Google recently rebranded it as "Google Voice" and added a number of features, the most interesting being voicemail transcription – Google will translate your voicemails into text and send them to you via email (and send as a text message).
Since it wouldn't let me leave myself a voicemail, Spudart was kind enough to call and leave a test message. The transcription is pretty bad. I've posted the resulting voicemail and transcription as a video on youtube.
Later this week I'll post his second call – reciting the Pledge Of Allegiance three times. 🙂
spudart said,
The Pledge of Allegiance one rocks. Stay tuned for that one!
March 23, 2009 @ 9:05 am
jaxun said,
Yeah, you'd think after building their voice recognition with Goog411, it'd be a little more robust huh? I just found out how to configure it so you can leave yourself a message.
Settings > Phones > Edit (the phone you use to call in, probably your cell) > Show Advanced Settings > Voicemail Settings > Yes.
Then you can create/modify your own contact info (within Voice) to send all calls from that number straight to voicemail. It's convoluted, for something that should just be Option 5 when you call your own number, but it's a workaround.
March 23, 2009 @ 11:54 am
sparx said,
That is a bit convoluted. I expect a "Leave yourself a note" type option to be added in the near future. Fingers crossed.
I was thinking the same thing about their experience with Goog-411, but realized that it's a bit different. After matching the city and state, they've narrowed their results set down to yellow pages listings of business names. It's much easier to phonetically match amongst such a small set of 1-5 word business names than an entire string of unknown words that could be any of millions of words.
Even with their 411 though, I've had to start over because the results were way off – typically when searching by business type rather than name.
March 23, 2009 @ 12:02 pm
sparx said,
e-mail reply from jaxun:
Good point about the G411 transcription training. It's always worked pretty well for me, but every so often I will get that god-awful gibberish sound that doesn't seem to want to stop. It's like the auditory equivalent of someone sticking their finger in my belly button!
I am really hopeful that Voice transcription will be better than Jott, and eventually include a mechanism to add items to Gcal with a phone call. Seems like a natural progression… but then so would Gmail not being beta anymore.
March 23, 2009 @ 8:35 pm