Computer voice-to-text technology has come a long way, and every time it gets better, new applications open up. It is still not 100 percent accurate. Hell, it’s not even 90 percent accurate. But it is accurate enough for automated voicemail transcription services to become increasingly available and good enough not to have to listen through 15 voicemails to get the gist of what they are about. Of course, voicemails are often translated incorrectly, sometimes to comic effect.
In a study comparing the accuracy of four different voice-to-text technologies (Google Voice, Preview in Microsoft Exchange, Ditech’s PhoneTag, and Yap) the one which came out on top was PhoneTag, which is now part of Ditech Networks. PhoneTag showed an 86 percent accuracy rate in translating 500 spoken messages into text. Google Voice was only able to achieve an 82 percent accuracy in its voice-to-text translations. The study only evaluated purely automated voice-to-text systems. Here’s how all four fared: → Read More
Invariably, whenever you dial into a conference call, someone is always late. Everyone waits until the last minute to call, and then it takes forever to find the email with the dial-in number and the passcode, and by the time you get through the voice prompts, you’ve already wasted five or ten minutes. A new service launching today from Ditech Networks called PoketyPoke tries to make conference calls easier to join. The first 100 people to sign up at the website will be invited into the private beta.
All you do is forward the conference call email invites with all of the dial-in and calendar information to PoketyPoke. It will then automatically dial into the conference call at the right time and simultaneously place a call to your phone, bridging the two calls. So instead of you dialing in, it calls you. PoketyPoke also works for two way calls. → Read More
Today Ditech networks is announcing that it’s releasing a fully automated version of its PhoneTag voicemail-to-text technology that can operate behind a company firewall, making the service available to the many businesses and organizations where privacy and security are important. The service will also be readily available to enterprise customers, as it is fully functional with Mutare’s popular Enabled VoiceMail servers (though businesses will have to pay to active it). The service will also work on older PBX’s.
James Siminoff, Ditech Chief Strategy Officer (and former SimulScribe CEO), says that this is the first fully automated voicemail-to-text service that can operate behind the firewall. Most services, he says, rely on some degree of human transcription for accuracy, which makes them unsuitable for organizations that deal with sensitive information (a competitor called Spinvox has been in hot water for using humans to transcribe text that was supposed to be automated, leading to an uproar over privacy issues). PhoneTag’s fully automated solution is capable of around 85% accuracy, which makes it a viable solution for businesses that don’t want their voice messages routed outside of the company. PhoneTag also offers a human-powered service for users who aren’t handling sensitive information, which can get up to 97% accuracy. → Read More
SimulScribe, the scrappy voicemail transcription company, didn’t get acquired exactly, but it just signed an exclusive partnership agreement with Ditech Networks that could be worth as much as $17 million. The deal is $7 million in cash up front with a $10 million earnout, and gives Ditech the exclusive rights to resell SimulScribe’s speech-to-text transcription services on a wholesale basis to telephone companies and developers. SimulScribe CEO James Siminoff will become the chief strategy officer of Ditech, and his co-founder Mark Dillon will also work there.
It is a decent outcome for a startup that raised only $5.7 million and is already profitable on sales of about $4 million, according to SimulScribe CEO James Siminoff. But competition is intense, with Spinvox on the one hand, which has raised an insane $200 million, and Nuance on the other, the speech-recognition behemoth which is nearing $1 billion in sales. SimulScribe offers its own voicemail-to-text service called PhoneTag, which has about 20,000 paying subscribers, and reaches about 80,000 more subscribers through wholesale partnershps with Vonage and British Telecom. → Read More
RebelVox is a voice communications platform that aims to makes your voicemail function more like email. The technology is not yet available for consumers, but it will soon be shopped around to developers who may want to incorporate it in other apps. RebelVox’s technology will allow you to leave a voicemail for someone without actually making a call to the person. RebelVox’s mobile app will let you make a voice recording that is delivered as a message to your contact both through a mobile application and their email account. Your contact will be able to respond via another voicemail message, text message or email. You will be able to pick up a voice message from a friend while they are leaving it and speak to them live as well. RebelVox also has linking software built for the PC and Mac which will allow users to control the messages through their computer as well as their mobile phone. RebelVox’s technology can be woven seamlessly into most email accounts, including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and Outlook.
Basically, RebelVox wants to let consumers interact with voicemail much like they would an email. Currently packaged as software, RebelVox is still exploring how it wants to sell the licensed (and patented) software and how much it would like to sell it for. The company’s co-founder, Tom Katis, says that RebelVox is in talks with both mobile phone companies and third party mobile application. The service contains features similar to Google Voice, SpinVox, and PhoneTag, especially the ability to control the interface through your computer. RebelVox is certainly no replacement for Google Voice, but offers some features that could be a nice add-on, such as the ability to send voice messages without making a call. → Read More
In August voice-to-text service Jott moved out of beta and added a premium feature for $4/month. Since then, the company says, about 30% of Jott’s active users have opted for the premium, no-ads version of the service.
People use it to send voice-to-text emails and sms messages, send Twitter messages, add calendar items, etc. Voice messages are transcribed into text via software with humans to clean things up.
The free version of Jott is going to end on February 2, CEO John Pollard told me today. The terrible advertising market, he says, means every customer has to pay their own way from now on. Customers will need to pay $4/month to continue the service, the current price for a premium account. This includes users of the Jott iPhone application. → Read More
Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it. When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program. But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily. Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally – let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back. How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?” Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message – “Just left you a VM, it’s important” – just so you know it’s there. There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks. The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert → Read More
Too often in the rush of trying to launch something new, entrepreneurs pay too little attention to coming up with a good name for their product or company. It might start off as a part-time project and they just want to get it up and running. So they pick the first name that comes to mind—often something awful—and then they are stuck with it. That is what happened to SimulScribe, a handy voice-to-text service that turns voicemails into e-mail. When James Siminoff and Mark Dillon started SimulScribe in 2003, both had other full-time businesses. It was a side project that they codenamed “Simultaneous Voicemail Transcription,” which they shortened to SimulScribe. But now five years later, it is a full-time gig that’s growing but the name is holding back the startup. Siminoff admits: The name SimulScribe totally sucks for our business. People have a real challenge remembering the name and they cannot spell it, which is a real problem considering that new customers need to type in our web address to sign up. When your company offers a consumer product that relies on viral marketing, a difficult name is a really bad thing. In fact, I’m constantly amazed at how well we have been able to do with such a shitty name. Name recognition is especially important when you are up against better-funded competitors like SpinVox (which could also use a better name, but has raised $200 million to SimulScribe’s $5.7 million). Siminoff has been looking for a new name for two years, one with a domain that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. Finally, a few months ago after a red-eye flight from LA to New York, after not returning many phone calls for days, a friend left a message saying he was tired of playing phone tag. Siminoff immediately called his chief marketing officer (at 6:30 in the morning) and told him to buy the domain. But PhoneTag.com was taken. Four months and $30,000 later, he bought the domain, and today SimulScribe is changing its name to PhoneTag. It is a much better name. SimulScribe was so off-putting somehow, but PhoneTag sounds fun. What do readers think, will it make any difference? In celebration of its new name. PhoneTag is giving away a free 30-day trial plus a special “F*#@ Voicemail” T-shirt to the first 100 TechCrunch readers who sign up here. The service is also launching a → Read More
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