Nuance’s marketing and product staff must have kept busy over the Labor Day weekend. The company made two announcements that hit the wire with the dawn’s early light today. This press release involves the incorporation of the Nuance flavor of voicemail-to-text transcription as part of a newly announced “World Plan” offered by commercial VoIP pioneer, Vonage. In a separate announcement, the company noted that, when the Samsung Rogue rolls out through Verizon Wireless, it will ship with pre-installed software that promotes dictation (of text messages) as well as command and control of Web browsing and many other features and functions of the high-end smartphone. [I will discuss at greater length both on the Internet2Go site, as well as in our soon-to-be-released research report on “Mobile Speech”.]

Vonage, and its charismatic CEO/Founder Jeff Citron, had always relied on innovation to differentiate itself from other carriers. It introduced a voicemail-to-text transcription service in 2007 ago under the name “Vonage Text”, reportedly turning to Simulscribe (now called PhoneTag) as a service provider. At the time it charged $0.25 for each transcribed message. The deal clearly was not an “exclusive”; one of PhoneTag’s long-time differentiators was its claim of being carrier-independent. Indeed, earlier this year in a press release, SpinVox claimed to be “live” with the following carriers around the world: Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Sasktel, Rogers Wireless, Telus, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa, Vodafone Spain, Movistar Chile, Skype, Vonage and Livejournal.

All the while, Vonage must have been trialing Nuance’s voicemail-to-text service for introduction as the “Visual Voicemail” element of its $24.99 montly flat rate “Vonage World” service plan. Vonage subscribers without the Vonage World plan can have voicemail transcribed for the going rate of $0.25 per message. There is a lot of wisdom in offering voicemail transcription as part of a flat-rate plan. I’ve been trialing the Nuance voicemail-to-text for about a year now (along with several others). In general the service is very good and accurate enough, but there are always utterances that are out-of-grammar or not rendered correctly. This is true of Google Voice, SpinVox, PhoneTag and even high cost transcription services. We all need editors.

Offering the service at no extra cost, as part of a premium VoIP service plan takes away some of the pricing friction and high expectations that accompany a premium service. It is definitely time for the services out to a broader population so they can get a feeling for when it works well and when it needs work. This is part of a socialization process that every new technology should go through. Get it into the hands of more people so that they can decide whether they will use it and then define the “when” and “how” they will use it.

Categories: Articles

Tags: speech processing, Nuance, Vonage, Samsung, Verizon, Visual Voicemail