Reading Your Voicemail, with Callwave
I've mentioned before how much I like Callwave. Well, time to increase that "likeability" measurement again! Callwave has introduced a "visual text" system they call "vtxt" which automatically translates the spoken word to the written word. And the kicker is, it actually works.
I recently was persuaded by Callwave to try their voicemail system in lieu of the iPhone's stock "visual voicemail" system. I have to say, I can't believe I waited this long to do it. By swapping Callwave in, I can now get a text message and email with the message someone leaves typed into the message! Meaning, I can read my voicemail. How good is it? I decided to call myself and leave myself the following message, which Callwave then converted into text:
"(Vtxt) Hi, this is Daniel Odio. I am leaving this as a message on my voicemail, which might sound a little strange to you because you're probably reading this on my blog, but that's the beauty of CallWave's voice transcription service, which is an automated transcription service that they have created. CallWave service allows for speech to be transcribed into text, which is then sent to the user as a text message or as an email or both, and so you can read your voicemail, which is a very strange concept to most people. So, let me just repeat how it works. You can actually read your voicemail by - whenever somebody leaves a message on your voicemail, it then gets transcribed by callwave.com into text and that text is then sent to you via text message on your phone or to your email or both. It's a pretty neat service, and I found that the accuracy is generally very good. We'll see how it is once this gets transcribed into text. But generally, I find it to be very good. Let me go ahead and just give my number so that you can see how a number transcribed. It's 202-250-3846. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy this text message that I get into my blog and post it as a blog posting, which also raises a lot of other possibilities about posting audio, you know, in text form and not having to actually write everything out. So, enjoy it and check the tool out. I'm very impressed."