Google Voice

The Gorilla has landed. In the world of automated speech to text transcription, the almighty google has put its foot down. Any company out there that was relying on software only is going to have a tough time ahead. Give them a few months and I bet there will be an API to access their automated transcription and then watch for over limits pricing via google AppEngine. More here. 

New players in the field

Looks like a couple more have joined in the human powered voicemail to text arena.

First comes Jott who started off as a notes transcription service has now moved onto voicemail. Price is $9.95 a month for 40 voicemails and 35 cents each additional.

The new kid on the block is Trapcall at $9.95 a month for 10 voicemails or $24.95 unlimited. Trapcall goes a bit further with their service and supports call recording and unmasking blocked callerID.

This is more evidence that software powered transcription is too premature for primetime. With the conomy the way it is, it'll be cheaper to have humans do the work that computers used to do!

Spinvox Humans - Tenzing

It was interesting to stumble across a call center's employee website that had some posts from agents working for spinvox transcribing messages. Wait .. what's with the D2 brain they have on the website? .. here's some of what was posted on the site:

when you're siting home all by your self in your cozy lil chair by your desk, and dont feel like talking to anyone at all.. or when you're in a meeting and dont have time for any voice messages..... Dat's when we spinvoxers come to the rescue!!!

when you find a text full of weird crap and underscores and phonatic marks and it totally makes no sense.....
thats us, its always us doing our best, getting fucked up, struggling to recognize deformed accents and grammer mistakes so you can always get the flawless voice to text service 8)

we work behind the scenes...we are the invisible hereos... we are Tenzing... we are unknown and they deny our existance !!
but we're okay with it !!
cuz we are noble, and we get paid of course=P

check how great we are and how amazing our effect on people is...
raise your self-esteem =D
==================
"This is the greatest service since vaccination. I am totally hooked and my life is changed. It is truly awesome!"
Mike Landman, CEO, Ripple

"SpinVox is excellent and a really cool service. I believe it's invaluable to the business user."
Will Findlater, News Editor, Stuff

"SpinVox provides a really simple and powerful way for us to interact with our audience and the possibilities are limitless."
James Walden, Digital Development Director, Magic FM
=======================

rock on m/ 3 cheers for us!!!

just think of all the liv... appointments that you saved everyday from being forgotten
think of the time that u help business owners save so they can make more and more money...
think of how you make the economy prosper by just sitting on your arse all day doing nothing but typing, typing , typing and listening and driving...
yeah driving!!
i mean aint these foot pedals make u feel like u're driving a car, not sitting on a desk on ur PC ??
============================

we will also discuss the severe symptoms and the way of treatment for the " O.S.D"
and the "P.S.S"
A.K.A>> obsessive spinvox disorder .. and post spinvox syndrome.

IBM 's Deep Blue takes on voice

Looks like IBM is making a foray into the voicemail transcription field with this recent announcement:

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0425787.htm

"Now, through our collaborative model, we are helping the IT market explore new growth opportunities enabled by our state-of-the-art speech technologies and solutions."

So is reprogramming deep blue's chess brain to transcribe voicemail messages the way of the future? What about accuracy?

According to this article:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2008/id20080818_745252.htm

IBM's software is now transcribing messages for phonetag and also powering vlingo and jajah.

Hey wait a minute, wasn't Vlingo supposed to be powered by Nuance as the company was started by former employees? Looks like they jumped shipped and now use IBM to convert audio to text.

Ahh, Nuance is suing Vlingo .. that's why:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9101238

Nuance is made of people.

Here I thought Nuance was entirely a software only voice recognition application and come to find they have 3000 transcribers working for them. Here's a link to an April 2008 press release:

http://www.nuance.com/news/pressreleases/2008/20080401_vm2txt.asp

“The Nuance Voicemail to Text Service integrates speech technology with over 3,000 Nuance transcriptionists, hosted in a Nuance-owned facility, with proven security, scalability, and reliability.”

So it looks like even the giant in the voice recognition field needs a little human help to increase accuracy.

List of all voicemail transcription companies

I figure we'd start this blog off with providing a list of all companies that offer this service. For those of you not familiar with this, voicemail transcription is when someone leaves you a voicemail message and then it gets converted to text format so you can read it. For you "Four hour work week" people and productivity nuts, this is definitely a time saver.

In Alphabetical order:

Service	price per month/#of messages
Callwave	$14.95 for 40 $24.95 for 200 $49.95 for 500
Gotvoice	$4.95 for 20 $9.95 for 40 $24.95 for 100
Phonetag	$9.95 for 40 $29.95 unlimited
Phonewire	$19 for 90 $29 for 200 $69 for 400 $299 for 1000
Quicktate	$3.50 for 10 $7.50 for 25 $12.50 for 50 $19.95 for 100 $29.95 for 200
Spinvox	£3.00 for 10 £5.00 for 20 £9.99 for 50
VoiceCloud	$9.95 for 50 $19.95 for unlimited

The above list are companies that integrate with your cell phone's voicemail system.
We're starting to see VOIP and other voicemail companies jump in on this

Vonage	25 cents per message
Onebox	$29.95 unlimited