The month before Apple revealed its “intelligent assistant,” Siri, Amazon was quietly buying out a company that performs voice-to-text actions like transcribing voicemails, whatever those are. In fact, its only user-facing product did just that, and its users received notice last month that the service would soon be discontinued.
CLT Blog, a local news source in Yap’s hometown, Charlotte, noted the change and discovered an SEC filing that, while it didn’t spell much out explicitly, did show that the merger documents were on file here in Seattle, in South Lake Union, in a building owned by Amazon. → Read More
A reader tells us Yap Voicemail, a mobile voicemail transcription app for iPhone and Android phones, will soon be no more.
Indeed, a message on the Yap Voicemail product page informs users that the service, which converts voicemails into text, thus making it easier to access, search and respond to voicemail messages from a mobile device, will be discontinued on October 20, 2011.
Yap Voicemail has been added to the TechCrunch deadpool. → Read More
Listening to voicemails is a huge waste of time. That’s why apps that transcribe your voicemail to text are a godsend. The new Yap Voicemail app is now available for the iPhone. You route your voicemails through Yap. It transcribes them for you using only speech-to-text technology (no humans), which allows it to offer the service for free (with ads at the bottom).
The transcriptions are not perfect—it mistook “Leena” for “Nina” and “drafts” for “trust” in one message, but Yap gets enough of the words right to figure out what the message is about. And you can always play the message in the app to listen to exactly what was said. Every time you get a message, a notification pops up with the name of the caller and the beginning of the message. Since it is completely automated, the message appears almost immediately after it is left on your voicemail, just like a text message. You can respond via email, SMS, or a phone call right from the app. → Read More
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
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
Yap, a company that translates voice into SMS text messages, has raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding round led by SunBridge Partners. Also participating in the round were Harbert Management Corportaion and Pittco Management. The site, which was a member of TechCrunch40, makes texting easier by using voice recognition software to transcribe spoken messages to text. The service runs on a small application installed on the phone, which captures the spoken message and uploads to Yap’s servers, which (hopefully) returns the spoken phrase. Yap aims to help cut down on the number of people who “text and drive”, by reducing the amount of time they’ll need to fumble with their phone. Of course, you’ll still need to look at the phone to read a response to your text message, so this isn’t totally solving the problem. As part of the deal SunBridge and Harbert Management Corporation will add partners to Yap’s Board of Directors. CrunchBase Information Yap Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Session two as follows, including our live notes. Cubic Telecom Cubic Telecom is creating a global Mobile Virtual Network (MVNo). The company aims to drastically reduce international calling rates by lowering mobile roaming and call charges. Founder Pat Phelan a well known communications blogger “wants a world in which anyone can pick up their mobile phone wherever they are and call anyone in any country for as long as they like without worrying about the price.” Nice start: global roaming rates suck: tell me about it! Product launch is today “Maxroam,” allows you to add numbers to the sim. Esssentially calls are routed from one number in each place. Every call on the mobile becomes a local call. This is a brilliant idea, didn’t mention the price though but said it was cheap. I want Yap Yap provides voice-to-text translation services for mobile phones. Users can say anything they like and Yap will send a text copy to anyone of their contacts. The service is completely automated so you won’t have intermediary Yap employees listening to your messages, typing them and then sending them out. They also have a text messaging application call Yap9 that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers. Users can also use the application to instantly query mobile web services just by talking. They can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube, or interact with Facebook without using their phones’ miniature keyboards. GotVoice, Spinvox, and CallWave also offer speech to text. Presentation problems: no audio on the video, but the music as they went on stage was an interesting touch: Singing in the Rain. Mic pics up a heartbeat: classic. Jason Calacanis jumps in to help with the presentation tech issues…deferring to next presentation. We’ll revisit Yap later. Ceedo Ceedo Technologies is a virtualization software company headquartered in Israel. Its patent pending approach to virtualizing the Windows’ desktop environment enables users to carry their PC-based work environment on portable devices such as USB flash drives, pocket hard drives, network drives and even mobile phones. Ceedo works well with the mobile device market. This is because it does not virtualize operating systems, which lets it load and operate more quickly while taking less drive space. Ceedo Mobile technology lets users connect their favorite mobile device to a PC without requiring installation or configuration. Strong start to presentation: “self contained device” with broad user interface. → Read More
