It’s official. The platform for AT&T’s Voicemail to Text service is Nuance Communications. As described on this page on the AT&T Wireless Web site, the carrier charges $9.99 per month for the service, which enables subscribers to receive transcriptions of voicemail messages as email and/or text messages in addition to the traditional dial-in-and-retrieve method.

This is something of a coup for Nuance in a hotly contested marketplace that spans the fully-automated service integrated into Google Voice to the various levels of human assisted services from DiTech Network’s PhoneTag and SpinVox, in addition to Nuance.

Back in September AT&T made an equity investment in Vlingo which might have given that speech-to-text specialist an inside track on transcription. However, Vlingo has applied its expertise toward spoken input for mobile applications – including search, text messaging and voice commands, and has not invested specifically in voicemail transcription and delivery.

I have been trialing Nuance’s Voicemail to Text for several months, and have it configured to deliver transcribed messages as email with the media file attached. I can attest to the fact that the quality of transcription is accurate enough to make it quite valuable for me. The service will now benefit from tighter integration with AT&T Mobility’s other enhanced messaging features and functions including delivery of the messages as SMS text.

Carriers have an important role to play in promoting speech-enabled services to mobile subscribers. Thus far they have been a promiscuous bunch, hedging their bets among providers of voice dialing, voice search, dictation and command. This multi-layered approach will prevail for the foreseeable future as mobile subscribers will ultimately vote with their pocketbooks to determine which services and pricing methodologies make the most sense (or cents) in the long run.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, Nuance, mobile speech, AT&T