BBGeeks comes to you today to discuss another major player in the voice to text game. Yesterday, we looked at Tellme and oneSearch, two voice based search engines. Today, we’re looking at GotVoice, a service that not only recognizes your voice, but transcribes it. This comes into play with your voicemail, as you can now receive a text message and/or email with the transcription of your voicemail, so that you don’t have to dial in and listen to it. I’ve been using it for a week, and I can’t tell you how much time it has saved me already.
What it does
It’s easy to say that the service transcribes your voicemails to text, so let’s go into how it accomplishes that. The first step, obviously, is signing up for a GotVoice account. In this you will include your phone number. After the initial sign up, you have to go into your account and set up calls to forward to GotVoice. This will allow them to transcribe your voicemails.
You’ll actually notice that your outgoing message is not the same anymore. It is now on the GotVoice system. This is actually a benefit for a Verizon user like me. It takes people an hour just to get through their outgoing message menu (”Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system…”).
After a few seconds of leaving a message, GotVoice will beep. This signals the cutoff point for SMS forwarding. Callers can continue leaving a message — the full transcript will be sent to email. However, the message will be truncated when sent to SMS. It’s a good thing GotVoice can send to both.
No more than a minute after you’d normally receive a voicemail, a text message will pop up in your inbox. This, as I said, will have a truncated version of the transcribed voice message. The message will also be emailed to you in its entirety, including an MP3 file of the actual voice message. It’s of an easily acceptable quality, so you’re covered on all fronts.
Super-accurate transcription
While oneSearch makes good with its promise that it will learn your voice over time, it seems that GotVoice has that capability right out of the box. They claim a 90 percent accuracy rate, and I can’t disagree with them. My trials of the service have yielded wonderful results. I even had friends call with funny and even ridiculous accents. Still, the GotVoice transcription service got most of the words right.
This is because they’ve got back and pulled data from carrier voicemail servers. That’s millions and millions of messages over the past five years. And they’ve all played a role in shaping GotVoice’s transcription engine. The difference is in the accuracy. As I said, they’re around 90 percent accuracy, while they claim competitors top out at around 65 percent.
Honestly, at first I thought it was a live transcription. I came to my senses soon enough (how uneconomical would that be?), but it still speaks to the accuracy. Subsequent tests have shown a few garbled words, but they were mostly names and otherwise indiscernible words — I checked the MP3 for each call, and yeah, sometimes my friends just mumble.
Security assurance
Of course, it would be difficult to run such a service without some level of human interaction. There are going to be some words that just can’t be recognized by the speech engine. There might not be someone transcribing each and every message, but surely there has to be some quality assurance. This raises the question of security. Just who is looking at your messages? And how much do they see?
I spoke to Colin Lamont, VP of marketing for GotVoice, about this issue. He tells me that humans only come into play for individual words or phrases that the engine does not recognize. So rather than a GotVoice employee listening to your entire message, they are limited to only those problematic voice strings. This creates a high level of security — it means random GotVoice employee isn’t listening to your intimate message to Mrs. BBGeeks Reader.
Additional features
If 90s sitcom characters had GotVoice, they might have avoided some comically awkward phone calls. Everyone has wanted to send someone a voicemail at some point without actually making the person’s phone ring. And while some carriers’ voicemail systems allow you to do this, it’s not nearly as easy as it is with GotVoice.
You can send the voicemail to single or multiple recipients. Just log into your account and go to “send message.” After that, you can either record your message with a mic, on your phone, or have GotVoice run a text to speech program — in a male or female voice. You can also add audio backgrounds, either from Audio Library or from an MP3 you upload.
GotVoice also has a Mobile Compose program, which allows you to record a message by dialing a number. You can then have it sent to groups you precreate. So if you need to let your dinner guests know you’ll be running a few minutes late, you can do it, even if you’re not near a computer.
Want to hear something really cool? (Well, only real if you’re an uber-geek.) You can have your voicemail sent to you as a podcast. Once you log into your GotVoice account, click on the “messages” tab, and then click on “Podcast/RSS.” Drag the podcast icon at the bottom of the screen into your podcast subscriptions in iTunes, and you’re set.
Get it free!
You can nab a version of GotVoice — their Lite offering — for free. This will give you access to most of the service’s features, though not as comprehensively as their paid tier. The Lite version sends you your new voicemails three times per day, so it’s not ideal if you have urgent phone needs. Also, there is no transcription service or MP3 attachment, so the free tier merely provides an online playback option.
The Premium service is what I’ve been describing. It gives you real time voicemails, transcriptions sent to SMS and email, MP3 attachments, and online storage. You can nab 20 voicemail transcriptions for $4.95 per month, 40 transcriptions for $9.95 per month, or $24.95 per month for unlimited.
This post originated at BBGeeks.com which not only features in-depth reviews of BlackBerry software, but is home to all things other things BlackBerry as well.
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Some more information on the unreleased flip BlackBerry codenamed Kickstart has surfaced… The leaked slides seem to be an attempt to soothe the worries of diehard BlackBerry fans who are used to holstering their devices and checking them in a very specific way. The external LCD screen will prove to be a useful feature, showing off the first few lines of a message, the face of callers, scrolling through alerts easily with the side volume keys, and opening those alerts just by flipping the BlackBerry open. Outside of the business utilities, the outer screen will also show album art of music playing, which can be readily controlled by the volume and muting keys. Pretty standard stuff for existing flips, but definitely gives reasons for sticklers to switch their form factor.
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![Blackberrywallet[3]](http://www.berryreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/wp-contentuploadsblackberrywallet3-small.jpg)
RIM has released 3 support documents for BlackBerry wallet. These documents outline exactly what a web developer or online store need to do to enable BlackBerry Wallet integration.
