Callwave: Text is the new voicemail
Posted on August 4, 2007
Filed Under cell phones, handy tools, productivity, voicemail | 2 Comments
I’ve always hated voicemail. In fact, I try to use it as little as possible. Since I’ve been a Blackberry user for years now, I typically rely on the call log to see who’s called. That’s half the battle, since most of the time I can guess what they want. Voicemail, however, does have its uses but there should be a way to make it easier to use. I’ve got a bad habit of letting voicemails pile up, so when a voicemail finally does arrive that I need to review I have to work my way through a couple dozen irrelevant or outdated ones to get to the message of importance. Furthermore, since most of my daily communication is centered around email there hasn’t been a good way to input important voicemail messages into my processing “loop”. I’ve tried a number of Internet based voicemail solutions–these have the advantage of archiving messages on a website (which allows for easier processing and mass deletion) and some forward voicemail messages to your email inbox with an attached audio file. This method offers something of an improvement, but you still have to work through a bunch of audio files that doesn’t mesh with my predominantly text based daily workload.
For the past month or two I’ve been using a new voicemail service called Callwave. Callwave offers a lot of the same functionality as the other web based voicemail services like a web interface, an option to receive your voicemail as audio files. They also offer some cool new features that I’ve only partially started to take advantage of. There’s a feature called “Callback” that lets you return calls with the push of a button in the web interface. As the Callwave folks put it “your phone will ring, and their phone will ring”. You can also respond to callers with a text(SMS) message via the web interface. There’s a nice contact manager and a log of all missed calls whether or not a voicemail is left.
Where Callwave is really trying to raise the bar, however, is with their voice to text interface. When a caller leaves a message the Callwave system transcribes it to text which it then delivers to you via one of several methods of your choosing including email and SMS. Since I have a Blackberry as my primary phone, I get my notifications via email. The way I’ve got it configured it has the advantage of showing up on my Blackberry almost immediately and gets logged in my Gmail in-box which makes follow up and general processing easier. Missed calls are likewise sent via email (or SMS if you so desire). The first time someone calls Callwave gets the name and city information from the caller ID info, but once you set it up in your contact list you’ll get notified with whatever name you’ve entered.
It’s a great idea, but for now the text recognition and transcription is clearly a “work in progress”. If you’ve ever messed around with a voice to text program (I used to use Dragon Naturally Speaking, for example) you already know that even the state of the art is far from perfect. Trying to transcribe voicemail messages–which present issues like countless speaking styles and accents, connection issues and so forth–has a much higher degree of difficulty. In all fairness to Callwave before I begin my critique of the voice-to-text performance, they’re definitely aware of the current limitations of the product. They’ve named the voice-to-text functionally “VText Gist”, and indicate that the goal is to give you the “gist” of a voicemail message via text output. They’ve got the product labeled as a “beta” and while its still in beta mode its free.
I get phone calls from people all over the country and, for that matter, all over the world. We’re talking some callers who have thick Italian, Latino or southern accents and others who speak as impeccably as Michael Buffer or the “Classy” Jimmy Lennon, Jr. And, being voicemail some people actually speak clearly but many don’t despite the Callwave system’s instruction to “speak clearly” to facilitate transcription. To Callwave’s credit, there’s not much qualitative difference among callers and non-native English speakers get transcribed the same as those with perfection diction.
The problem is that the quality of the transcription is still not that great. Even with Callwave only trying to provide the “gist” of the voicemail message much of the time you’re left with often unintentionally funny gibberish. There’s been a few times where I actually *did* “get this gist” of the voicemail from the Callwave transcription, but in these instances I already basically knew what the call was about. Other times even when I *did* know the basic topic of the message I was still clueless. Here’s a few examples. The first is a call from my local library reprimanding me about some overdue books. Since this was a call *from* an automated dialer *to* an automated system the degree of difficulty is pretty low:
RICHLAND COUNTY work called from 803-933-9665 in Columbia, SC. Vtxt Gist of this message:
“…address has items on hold for items overdue if you have any questions please call any of our tends library locations.”
That was pretty good. “Richland County” obviously covers a lot of ground but I’ve since entered “Richland County Public Library” in my contacts. And the “gist” of the message came through loud and clear–I’ve got overdue books out and I better get them back in. The only word that was transcribed incorrectly was “ten” which came across “tends”, but this didn’t impact the clarity of the message.
This does, however, indicate another problem with the system for now–the Callwave service pulls out a snippet of the message trying to convey its “gist”. With a short, to the point call like the one above that’s not a big deal. The problem is that long, rambling and less focused voicemail messages are more the exception than the rule. As a result, there’s no guarantee that the part of the message transcribed by Callwave is really what’s important. Now, granted, people should generally leave more succinct voicemail messages for a number of reasons but the reality is that they don’t.
The next message was from a friend returning a call and suggesting dinner plans. The only way I knew this was the reference to “blue cactus”, which is the name of a local restaurant:
“…I’m just calling you back sorry it took me a little while I’ve been in the meeting all day but just call me back. I was thinking that if you lag we could go to like an early turner thing at blue cactus because I’m creating blue cactus so just coming back up talk to you later”
Now, the only way I was able to get the “gist” of this message was the reference to the ‘blue cactus’. If I had been new in town or otherwise didn’t know it was a local restaurant I would have been absolutely clueless.
Clearly, there is still much to be done to improve the voice-to-text functionality but this could very well be the “killer app” for Callwave. Once I can count on a clearer translation of the messages I’d gladly pay for this service. This function aside, the other web based voicemail features are excellent. The service is easy to set up and highly configurable. While its still in beta and free I highly recommend you give it a shot–once the text-to-voicemail transcription catches up with the rest of the service it’ll be something that you’ll gladly pay for and wonder how you ever did without.
CallWave Modern Voicemail: Text is the New Voicemail
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I tried callwave somehow I didn’t like it as much as my youmail which I ended up keeping. I guess the whole limited free business was kind of a deal breaker but both services are awesome, and yes, you will wonder how you lived without it.
<em>I tried callwave somehow I didn’t like it as much as my youmail which I ended up keeping. I guess the whole limited free business was kind of a deal breaker but both services are awesome, and yes, you will wonder how you lived without it.</em>
First of all thanks for being the first person to post a comment on our new blog
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Unfortunately YouMail doesn’t support Alltel at the moment so until they do I guess I’ll be sticking with CallWave….</p></p>