The technology available to folks working at home these days is amazing. CallWave is now offering “Voicemail As Text” or VTxt service.
It doesn’t transcribe everything… just enough to give you the gist of the message.
It was just written up in WIRED magazine:
Enter Vtxt, a new service from CallWave that transcribes voicemails and sends them to you as text messages or e-mails. All you have to do is forward your calls to a unique phone number supplied by CallWave. Your messages are processed by an automated speech-recognition engine and sent to you in about four or five minutes. You can choose to receive the transcriptions as text messages, e-mails or on the CallWave website.
The Santa Barbara, California, company will open up Vtxt as a free public beta for North American users on Monday, but I had an opportunity to test the service last week. It has a few quirks, but its usability and features trump similar services from Phonewire, SimulScribe and SpinVox.
During testing, I had several friends call me and leave messages of varying lengths from different locations. One friend called me from his car with the window rolled down, another from the back of a noisy concert hall. Others called from the quiet of their offices. I also left several messages for myself reminding myself of appointments. Each message came through with only a few transcription errors.
None of the messages came through word-for-word, and although it may seem strange, that’s the point. As CallWave notes on its website, its text transcription service only gives you the “gist” of the voicemail.
Phrases like “call me back” or “I love you” are always transcribed. Also, numbers, dates, times and anything that suggests urgency — words like “hospital” or “emergency” — are left in. Unimportant things like salutations, hesitation sounds, repeated information and rambling phrases like “so anyway” are stripped out. This keeps the message down to an easy-to-process 140 characters, letting you see quickly what the message is about.
CallWave staff scientist Dr. Anthony Bladon, who developed the speech-to-text engine, says Vtxt offers a method of processing information akin to the way we quickly assess the urgency of an e-mail by scanning the subject line in our inbox.
“We provide only the information that answers the questions, ‘Do I need to act on this now? Do I need to call this person back?’” he says.
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