I decided to take a break from watching Google-zilla’s next move. Yes, the search monster has some interesting news today with Voice Actions for Android. Terrific. But there are also capable speech rec apps outside their orbit, in the competitive world of what the FCC calls information services.
Last month I tried the OnSIP cloud-based PBX. This startup has since partnered with PhoneTag to provide transcriptions of voicemail. I’ve known about the PhoneTag service when it had the eponymous designation of the corporate owner, Simulscribe. Good move on their part with this name change.
PhoneTag has taken the approach of supplementing its algorithms with crowdsourced workers who copy edit the harder-to-transcribe sessions.
It takes a few clicks to set this up, and before you could say “net neutrality” I was able to email .WAV files from my OnSIP virtual PBX voicemail to the PhoneTag service. The results are quite good.Continue reading