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Skydeck is just one company using the in-box metaphor to manage text messages and voicemail.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)In the tech world, if you can't beat 'em, you can always join 'em, or at least integrate their service into yours. This is the approach that mobile phone manager Skydeck is taking with Google Voice, and it's a good one.
When we demoed Skydeck in April, it struck us as a useful service for managing your contacts, calls, and voicemail online as you would your e-mail. Never mind that its online interface isn't as slick or easy to use as competitors' services (like RocketVox or Dashwire). And like its technological cohort, we figured Skydeck was surely in danger of having its users swallowed up by Google Voice once that behemoth of a calling service opened up to all.
Skydeck's solution, unveiled earlier this week, is to integrate partial support for Google Voice. The gist is that you keep your original cell phone number (which otherwise you would have to change to use Google Voice). Skydeck will forward your missed calls to Google Voice, which can then route them to your other phones (landline, work, etc.) for you to pick up. If someone leaves a message, Skydeck can still log the voicemail with its service. You'll lose Google Voice's call blocking and routing features, but you can retain its voicemail in-box and automated voice-to-text transcriptions. There's a video to explain it more here.
The mashup lets you use Skydeck's core features for free while gaining Google Voice's transcription service. Skydeck is otherwise happy to sell you its own $15 premium voicemail transcription. As that's powered by SpinVox, the cost comes from employing human helpers, versus Google's machine transcription.
Skydeck's offer won't appeal to all. Even in closed beta, Google Voice, which was once the GrandCentral service, already gathers many of Skydeck's features and more, and if your goal is to take advantage of Google Voice's offer to replace three numbers, say, with one new number, then using your old mobile phone number with Skydeck while adding a new Google Voice number isn't going to sound like much of a deal. You'll wind up with one extra number, not one less. Yet if you're not a fan of Google Voice's current setup (reviewed)--which has you sign up for a new number and routes outbound calls through their service--but you still like the idea of free voicemail transcriptions and call-forwarding to multiple phones, then this could be a happy medium.
Skydeck is available for Windows Mobile 6.x, Android, and BlackBerry phones running version 4.2 of the operating system or higher. Skydeck and Google Voice are currently available in the U.S.
Skydeck is a useful-looking mobile message management service that creates a comfortable way to read and respond to phones calls, voicemail, and text messages from the Web. It differs from similar offerings by providing a classic in-box interface online, complete with a reading pane, folders, annotation abilities, and tagging. Skydeck also builds in a visual voicemail service operated by SpinVox so you can read your inbound messages in addition to listening to them. A search bar at the top of the page that helps you quickly find phrases and messages--including content from those transcribed voicemails.
Skydeck's in-box metaphor makes it intuitive to use.
(Credit: Skydeck)If you have a headset, you're conveniently able to initiate an outbound call through your computer, though to your contact, it will look like you're calling from your cell phone. Skydeck also includes a bidirectionally-synced address book that organizes contacts by how often you communicate, therefore doubling as a speed dial. Any changes you make online show up on your phone, and vice versa. Lastly, Skydeck's telephonic powers can often find phone numbers for missed or blocked calls, says Skydeck CEO Jason Devitt.
Like fellow voicemail service YouMail, Skydeck's service requires you to forward your cell phone number to Skydeck for the software to work. You'll also need to download a small client to the phone so Skydeck can sync the address book and text messages. Skydeck's voice-to-text transcription service in particular is what makes it a premium service whose pricing ranges from about $10 to $30 a month, and the price plan is what makes business users and prosumers Skydeck's target audience. To its credit, Skydeck offers a free 14-day trial for anyone who wants to test it for themselves.
VoIP provider Skype plans to announce Tuesday that it will be working with SpinVox to provide its users with voice-to-SMS messaging in four languages.
This adds another option to Skype's messaging notifications for both Windows and Mac, and it includes a free e-mail notification or a simple SMS notification when a contact leaves a message.
Converting the messages from voice to text won't be cheap, however. Users will pay 25 cents per message, not including the standard Skype text message rate, and long voicemails could be spread out over as many as three messages. If the entire voicemail won't fit into three texts, then the message will be cut off. Also, if the message is garbled or otherwise unconvertible--because of poor signal quality, for example--SpinVox and Skype will still charge you for the failed conversion effort.
Words that cannot be understood will be converted into question marks or spaces in the body of the message. Fortunately for the cost-conscious, there are several options for cutting down on quickly running up a massive bill. Users can configure which of their Skype contacts will have their voice messages converted, so it's not an all-or-nothing deal. Messages will also only be sent after a 10-minute delay, so you don't have to worry about getting a text if you walk away from your desk for a few minutes. You'll have the option of configuring a maximum number of voicemail conversions per day, too. An obvious problem with that is missing that must-get voicemail, but at least the option will be there.
SpinVox with Skype will support English, Spanish, French, and German, and there are plans to incorporate SpinVox's current support for Italian and Portuguese, as well.
At the beginning of April, I met with VoiceCloud CEO Gerald Marolda to take a tour of the company's voice mail-to-SMS service. VoiceCloud, which relies on human translators instead of software to transcribe calls, competes with Spinvox, SimulScribe, and CallWave.
A month ago at CTIA Wireless, the hatchling service was just being introduced. Now everyone is invited to try. From the Web site, enter the invite code, "cloud," and your phone details to get started. Users will be able to test the application free of charge for about a month, Marolda says, before a pricing structure is imposed.
If you want to convert a series of 1's and 0's to text, ask a computer. If you want to convert a voice message into a text message, ask a human.
VoiceCloud transcriptions are made from people!
(Credit: VoiceCloud)That's the crux of the argument given by VoiceCloud, which launched into the voice-to-text fray on Tuesday with a speedy, employee-focused transcription service.
Speech-to-text is a huge trend in wireless and Web apps this year that--judging from the numerous services showcased at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas this week--is heating up as an important frontier in cell phone software. You may have read about Spinvox and SimulScribe, and CallWave, but according to VoiceCloud CEO Gerald Marolda, his company's service gives a faster, more faithful experience than letting software do linguistics.
With VoiceCloud, the voice message is broken into chunks using an in-house, proprietary software, and each audio segment is sent to an available transcriber who types the section and resubmits it. The software takes over from there, recombining the textual fragments and pushing them, quickly, to an e-mail or SMS message--your choice.
"Many companies claim to use voice-to-text software," said Marolda, when asked why he preferred people power. "But there is no technology in the market that exists right now that gives you the accuracy you need." Instead, VoiceCloud's CEO suggests that many competitors outsource editors or have humans double-check software transcriptions. VoiceCloud's free beta service is available from any cell phone browser and is optimized for the iPhone.
Crowdsourcing gets it right
YouMail's CEO, Alex Quilici, agrees that voice-to-text as it stands is essentially broken. But instead of employing Homo sapien ears like VoiceCloud, he opts for community cooperation and socially-derived ratings as the sure fix, believing that bipeds can be leveraged to correct transcription mistakes over time.
A new feedback loop joins the readable voice-mail service of YouMail, a neat bit of webware for managing voice mail like e-mail. A pop-up feedback form on the online account offers the opportunity for the masses to send programmers ratings, red flags, and helpful edits that will be integrated back into the transcribing process. Oft-repeated errors will be the first to undergo scrutiny, and responsive users giving sound feedback can help speed the correction process, Quilici added.
In addition to releasing the voting function for transcription quality, YouMail also has rolled out SmartGreetings, a feature that personally greets callers whose names match entries in a database of 4,000 "common" names. Maybe YouMail will get people power to grow that database, too.
When it comes to editing incorrect voice-to-text transcriptions, Homo sapiens have the magic touch.
(Credit: YouMail)
One of the more interesting voice-to-text companies out there is SpinVox, which has been kicking around for the last four years. This week they've added a really cool new feature that adds voice-to-text support for some popular "microblogging" networks like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, as well as status update and wall support for Facebook. Once you've registered your logins with the service, you can call a single telephone number and post to all of them at once, or pick which ones you want your message to go to.
The service is aimed at people who don't want to spend time typing out messages on their mobile handset or spend money on an SMS message. It's also worth noting this is one of the easier ways to use Pownce from your phone, short of going through its unofficial iPhone application.
What interests me more than this is Spinvox's blogging component called Spin-my-Blog. Like the social networking integration, you can set up your personal blog to work with the voice-to-text service. Calling your special number and leaving a message will automatically convert to a written blog post that will auto-publish to your blog. Blog owners can also publish their special number to their blog page, letting their users create their own posts. I asked if the company was working on a system similar to this to handle user comments on blog posts, and the answer is that it's "in development."
I am in favor of any tool that saves me from listening to voicemail on a phone. I use CallWave (review) on my cellular line to shunt voice mails to my e-mail, and I've been using GotVoice (review) on my home phone for the same purpose. GotVoice, to date, has been a bit of a hack: It got your voice mails by dialing up your voice mail, just as you did, and then entering the right touch tones so your messages would play, which it then recorded and sent to you. Pure replacement voice-mail systems (like CallWave, SpinVox, and SimulScribe [review]) work better. Now GotVoice is joining that camp, and adding other tools to bring it up to feature parity. As long as you can set your phones to forward calls when there's no answer, you can use GotVoice's new visual voice-mail answering service. If you can't do that, the GotVoice brute-force approach to recording your messages will still work.
The system will now transcribe messages, just like the competing systems do. I've found these transcription services to have much less than perfect recognition, but they're good enough so you can tell which messages are important.
GotVoice also has a cool text-to-speech feature for replying to voice mails: On your PC or your mobile, you can reply with text to a voice or transcribed message, and GotVoice will send your text via SMS if the recipient is a mobile phone; for landline phones, it will convert your message to speech and read it to the person or machine who answers. That's clever.
You can also use GotVoice to blast one recording out to multiple recipients. Features the GotVoice team are prepping for future releases inlcude "barge-in," like CallWave offers, so you can listen in on people leaving you messages and pick up the call before they hang up, and the capability to have custom greetings for particular callers.
There's a free version of GotVoice, but the transcription feature is only available as part of the paid service ($9.95 a month). CallWave's transcription feature is free.
When former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki launched Truemors two months ago, the site was not well-received. The quality of the user-generated content on the site was low. The U.K. tech site The Inquirer called it the "worst Web site ever discovered."
But it's been a while, and the site has improved. Although Kawasaki is using the site as an example of what can be done on the Web when your personal brand is high and Web developers are cheap -- he says, "You can do a stupid thing for $12,000. Life is good!" -- the site is actually not stupid. It's interesting, and far from the worst Web 2.0 app out there. So forget the man behind the site. Let's look at it as just another Web 2.0 start-up.
Truemors is a "rumors" site. The idea is that you submit a gossip item, and then other people mark it as interesting or not. The interesting items bubble up to the top. Users can also comment on rumors.
My Truemor. Plausible? Maybe. But fake. (I dictated this rumor into the Truemors phone service.)
There are smart elements to Truemors. First, if you've got an item, it's very easy to post it. You can submit items by Web form, e-mail, SMS, and even by voice (Spinvox does the speech-to-text). Since it's a gossip site, you can submit items anonymously.
Interesting science rumors.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Truemors is easy to read. There's a length limit on posts, and items are broken out by category. If you're interested in politics, food, tech, or sex, you can dive right into those and other categories. And the content is not bad. You don't get the geek overload that you do with Digg. Checking the site over the past few days, I found several interesting items, both gossip and actual news. (Unfortunately, the category pages don't yet have their own RSS feeds.)
However, for Truemors to work the way its designers intend, it has to be curated. The Truemors team removes slander, libel, pornography, abject promotional items, blatant advertising, and even boring items. The editorial touch-up on the user-generated items is what keeps the site entertaining and largely free of crap. As long as that can keep going (deputizing devoted readers is a way to do it for free) the site could stay useful.
If the site grows, it will need a more developed community. We'll need ways to follow or ignore items from certain people or groups. We'll need very active moderators, because a successful Truemors site will be overrun with items from bloggers who just prefix their blog headlines with "Did you hear..." and dump them on the site.
Meantime, I like it. It reminds me a bit of StumbleUpon, which is a very efficient way to waste time wandering the Net, except Truemors is text, which is even more efficient. In fact, Truemors reads a little like Harper's Magazine's "Findings" section, except that some of the items are fabrication. But it's still a surprisingly good way to scan for entertaining info tidbits.
As our lives get busier and we become more reliant on text messages and e-mail, voice mail is starting to seem a tad archaic (not to mention impractical if you're sitting in a business meeting or loud bar). A company called SimulScribe has come up with a technology that claims to be the answer.
The New York-based start-up uses voice recognition technology to transcribe voice mails into text. Instead of having to sit through Grandpa Bill's three-minute voice mail, you'd get a written message, via SMS or e-mail, approximately two to five minutes after the voice mail was left, with every word Grandpa said. If you want to listen to your message the old-fashioned way, you can still call your voice mail and check it.
SimulScribe seems to combine the functions of GotVoice, with its PC capabilities, and SpinVox with the SMS function. The service also claims to have over 90 percent transcription accuracy, and unlimited voice mail storage. When I tested it out with company CEO James Siminoff, my poorly voiced message was accurate enough to have meaning. During the demo, Siminoff said the company has programmed its transcription software to not clean up or correct the content of the voice mail, to maintain authenticity.
Although the service, which is free for a week to try and then costs $9.95 a month for 40 messages, will work on any cell phone, it performs optimally on smart phones. On Monday, SimulScribe plans to announce its partnership with popular VoIP service Skype, providing Skype users the capability to receive their voice messages in text. More announcements are rumored to be on the way in late spring.
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