To really fill a niche, Google Voice needs to provide one extra bit of crossover functionality. Right now it records up to three hours of phone calls to your Google Voice number, and it also transcribes up to a three minute long voicemail.
I’m hoping Google Voice will change this. It is one feature that anyone who conducts interviews, does research, or takes minutes the world over has always wanted: a transcription service.
Being able to read voicemails rather than listen to them is one of the service’s key propositions. This feature also improves searching, as it means if there’s a piece of information embedded in there, you’ll be able to search through the voicemail transcriptions. And herein lies the keyword. Transcription. Google Voice transcribes. From here, it’s one step to transcribing phone calls, the phone calls it records. For me, whether or not this functionality comes in will be the making or breaking of Google Voice.
Until Google Voice any voice transcription was elus ive, mostly because it’s really hard to do. And perhaps that’s why it’s being held back now. As Google so rightly points out: “This is the only fully automated voicemail transcription on the market. This means, however, that it’s not perfect yet. It will improve over time as our transcription engine gets smarter. The quality of the transcripts will vary.”
Until Google Voice goes global, its impact won’t be felt strongly enough, nor will the capabilities of its voice recognition and transcription abilities really be tested. But still, correcting a one hour transcription is enormously preferable to actually transcribing the thing, as anyone who’s ever had a heavy transcription load will testify.
But this is still reasonably new technology – will it really be effective once launched in the UK, when faced with the challenge of recognising the breadth of British accents, from inner city Glasgow to deepest Somerset?
