GotVoice Adds Talking Bears and Speech-To-Text Transcription
Nick Gonzalez
12 comments »
GotVoice is a great voicemail utility that has so far focused on delivering visual voicemail (phone/web), custom voicemail greetings, and broadcasting voice messages (like Pinger). Through some clever coding, GotVoice links directly into your voicemail to pull messages into the system and send messages back out through it. However, the product has been lacking one of the killer voicemail features of their competitors, speech-to-text.
Today they’re differentiating themselves from GrandCentral and closing the gap with their other competitors by adding speech-to-text transcription. And adding avatars to boot.
Their new avatar system will let you add some personality to your voicemail playback using SitePal’s avatars. It’s sure to come in handy if for some reason you enjoy getting your messages delivered by a bear.
Their speech-to-text offering allows you to transcribe voicemails to text for delivery via email or SMS. You can transcribe all your messages, or filter by contact. Transcription is available on their $9.99/month premium accounts including 40 messages a month with additional charges for each message thereafter, although they have a 14 free trial.
Spinvox and CallWave also offer call transcription. Spinvox is pricey in the U.S. if you take into account exchange rates, costing £9.99/month for 50 messages. CallWave is currently a good deal, transcribing calls for free during their open beta.
I wonder how they do the speech-to-text. I’m not aware of any systems, even experimental, that can do a fair job with compressed 8×8. You laugh at the dancing bear, but this is the killer feature.
Man…I wish transcription as an option could be seamlessly integrated into my iPhone’s visual voicemail.
Heretic - Many of these services offering speech-to-text are actually 3rd party technology sewn together. GotVoice is a good service but gets expensive if you’re getting lots of voicemails - in testing beware of long delays in message notification during peak hours.
I’ve been using something similar for abut 9 months that’s free called YouMail (http://www.youmail.com) that I also highly recommend.
Nick, do you know about SimulScribe? They offer voicemail-to-text services. The entire transcription is emailed to you along with the original voicemail audio…which SpinVox and CallWave don’t offer. They also have a visual voicemail application that lets you listen to and read voicemail from your handheld, which not even the iPhone offers. SimulScribe is awesome….fab-u-lous!
Our corporate phone system simply sends MP3’s as file attachments from the phone server. I prefer hearing the intonation of the person who called me rather than reading a text message.
There’s something to be said about listening to the voice of your customers, investors and business associates that could never be replaced by a text solution.
Furthermore, if the person sending the message wanted me to receive a text message, wouldn’t they just send me an email?
David
Nothing new here - these guys are way late to market. Voicemail-to-text has been available through SimulScribe for years. SimulScribe has near perfect transcription accuracy for reading mobile, home and work voicemail. SimulScribe is offering a 30 day free trial at: https://apps.simulscribe.com/signup/a/simulscribe30
Visual Voicemail has numerous applications, as well as personalization features. Hats off to Curt, Bruce and team at GotVoice.
Factual Change: The speaking avatar platform is powered by Voki, not SitePal. Both are products of Oddcast in NYC, but Voki is the consumer speaking avatar platform developed for social networks, blogs and communities as a whole.
Check it out at http://www.voki.com
#5 said ….”There’s something to be said about listening to the voice of your customers, investors and business associates that could never be replaced by a text solution”.
Nobody will argue with you here. But, you being a CEO, you’re probably tied up in meetings all day. and since you can’t answer your cell phone while seating in those meetings then the text version makes sense.
Seems kind of expensive for disabled people, whom I’d could see using this (a friend’s father who had a stroke for example and has a hard time typing).
The avatar feature is quite interesting and I’m glad to see GotVoice entering the speech-to-text transcription business. Competition is always healthy for further enhancements in technology. Due to the inability of most software to analyze and understand the nuances of multiple vocal patterns, there is still room for improvement in each company. Even those listed above, including GotVoice, Simulscribe, and CallWave, cannot claim to have a perfect answer to the problem. Most, including Simulscribe and Gotvoice, use a combination of software analysis and human transcription to deliver a quality user experience.
For transparency’s sake, I think it’s only fair to announce that I’m a product manager at CallWave. At CallWave, we prefer to be upfront with our user’s when posting to forums and blogs, to avoid looking like a satisfied customer who happens to really like a product. Unlike a few posters above, namely DSB, we pride ourselves on being upfront about our reactive promotion.
The same word for word response was given by DSB on a very similar post today for GotVoice. http://www.startupreporter.com/?p=235
I see nothing wrong with touting the benefits of a product when given the chance, nor do I see anything wrong with addressing misgivings about a product’s downsides, but I do believe there is something wrong with not addressing yourself as an agent of the company you are representing.
Phil@Callwave- I’m sure everyone reading these posts can appreciate your candor. But, there is no need to punk out anybody. The market will eventually pick the winner. Fact of the matter is this new offering as well as yours (CallWave) is cute and nothing more. It’s not like you have developed a killer application, and yes I can’t believe GotVoice got funded in the first place. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but Callwave has been a disaster as a public company with little vision, innovation and direction from the executive leadership team (though I see you now have a new CEO). If I was Callwave I would be more concerned with a company such as Ringcentral or Kall8 putting you out of business. As a matter of fact may be you guys should acquire an established Virtual PBX company to help ramp your revenues so your stock price starts to exceed your book value.
Disclosure - I DO NOT work at any of the companies mentioned, but I did stay at Holiday Express last night.
Hello, all. I use Callwave and RingCentral (both, each for a different business) and I have had no problems - ever - with each. I’ve used RingCentral for about a year now (for a non-Internet business), and I have used callwave for probably 2 years now to manage my incoming cell phone calls.
You can read my reviews of both RingCentral and Callwave here: http://www.small-business-phone.com
With all due respect, I don’t think Callwave is a useless application at all, yet their speech-to-text app (as, I believe ALL such apps) needs some maturing.
The good thing about Callwave is that you’re not relying on them to provide you with an actual phone number (the service uses your own cell phone number). So should Callwave ever go away, all a user has to do is the quick ‘deprogramming’ of the service.
The reason I chose RingCentral for my other business (in which you have to rely on them being around for a long time, because they do provide you with a phone number) is that I believe of ALL the Virtual PBX companies (RingCentral, GotVmail, etc), RingCentral is among the one to three that will be around for a long time.
-J.B. Malik
Small-Business-Phone.com