Voicemail to Text

When I posted a couple days ago about Spinvox taking in a very large funding round, I missed an announcement that same day about Nuance’s new voicemail to text service, which they have decided to cryptically call Voicemail to Text. Nuance is providing this service only through telecom carriers.

The thing I found most interesting is that the Voicemail to Text product page states that Nuance’s transcription software is supported by over 3,000 human transcriptionists. Well, they don’t specifically say human, but I think that’s a safe bet. I would have thought that if any company could completely automate the transcription process, it would be Nuance. Then again, I often can’t understand all of the words in the voicemail messages I receive, and last time I checked, I was human.

Recently I interviewed for a position at Voxify an engineer who worked on such a service at a company that develops unified messaging software. They were trying to fully automate the voicemail transcription process, though they seemed to be targeting for a much less complete transcription. That would still be useful if you receive a lot of voicemail messages, as it might allow you to better prioritize the order in which you go through the backlog. I get upwards of three voicemails a week from my retinue of admirers, so this isn’t such a problem for me, though it would let me quickly skip through the majority of those messages that are wrong numbers.