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Apple Testing Service That Allows Siri to Answer Calls and Transcribe Voicemail
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I say yes please to this feature. It's a pain to check voicemail and go through the rigmarole of pressing a random string of numbers just to access the latest message.
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Siri can barely understand me, I dread to think of the messages I'm going to receive...
I might ever inflict Siri on those who try to contact me. With exception of an incoming robo-call.
Little known fact: People who argue about punctuation on message boards all suffer from sexual dysfunctions of some kind.
A nice feature to ADD, but for me it would never fully replace listening to VM. A text can't relay emotion and sometimes context. Important for personal but also business interactions.
It would be nice if Siri could handle it. Google Voice does a mediocre job of it. YouMail does a decent job as part of their paid service, and will do custom messages per caller as long as you've shared your contacts.
I've used PhoneTag (previously Simulscribe) since it debuted almost a decade ago. I don't remember the last time I actually listened to a voicemail.
I've used PhoneTag (previously Simulscribe) since it debuted almost a decade ago. I don't remember the last time I actually listened to a voicemail.
Then your Siri is smarter than mine. What can I say. Any question regarding weather other than "what's the temperature," or "what's the weather," or "is it going to rain," gets me a trip to Wikipedia. Maybe, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, I'm asking the question wrong. Perhaps it highlights the inconsistency of Siri and maybe Apple should focus on that before added worthless gimmicks like answering my phone.
Transcribing voicemail? Oh, heck yeah! I just wish I had it available for my work voicemail. Voicemails are always a huge time suck for me. I would love the ability to get the gist of what a caller is after with just a glance.
It's no issue for most of you, but Apple has been heavily focusing on language-dependant services these days, and this is not good news for people using their phones outside US/UK. Siri still does not speak my native language, although it (she?) was introduced 4 years ago.
Anything Siri I avoid with a barge pole, so this rumour couldn't get me less excited.
For me, Siri is the opposite of a selling point. It makes the Apple Watch's reliance on it particularly unattractive.
Voicemail is great. I leave a message knowing that the other person will receive it 100% correct all the time. Siri will never do that, because it is mega-dumb.
For me, Siri is the opposite of a selling point. It makes the Apple Watch's reliance on it particularly unattractive.
Voicemail is great. I leave a message knowing that the other person will receive it 100% correct all the time. Siri will never do that, because it is mega-dumb.
I believe GWallet & Apple Pay falls under a "execution is everything" type of thing. I'd say Apple Pay is probably one of the things they done alright in executing lately, unlike some other things. Most people, like that 95% that aren't on tech forums, never knew of google wallet. So once again, Apple waited for the right timing with not being the first and introduced it to the masses.
When you think about it, the majority of things Apple brings aren't really "first", they just do it right and bring it to the masses. It's usually the very nerdy things that they are the first on that people really don't care that much about. IE terraced battery cells.
Anyways, I prefer Apple's implementation over Googles PLUS I know my data isn't being mined to be sold off.
Have you tried Google Voice. Let that transcribe a few voicemails for you and then come back and tell me how productive it is for you. Like I said in my original post, Google has had years fiddling with it and still can't get it right. Maybe if I understood Babble I'd have an easier time of it.
I'm sure the security services have similar tech too, to save operators the trouble of listening to thousands of hours worth of recorded phone conversations.
Apple keeps adding more things for Siri to do, but the most important thing--its ability to understand speech--doesn't seem to have gotten much better. So Siri can do more things, poorly. And lack of offline for common things makes relying on it pointless. My philosophy is, if I can't count on something working when I need it, I don't count on it at all. I'm looking forward to seeing if Cortana understands voice any better than Siri, though I suspect it'll be online as well.
Why not just keep using voicemail transcription powered by people? I've tried speech recognition for voicemail and it just never works right. Phonewire.com is cheap and accurate. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
It's possible you receive higher quality voicemails than I do. The problem I have is that most of my voicemail messages start out as babble, so a little transcription degradation isn't going to hurt matters any.
For me, a typical work voicemail is going to look something like this: "Hey Ray, how's your summer going? You have a chance to get any vacation time in yet? So, this is Bob Obtuse from the Denver office. I was calling because we had a question come up, and I was hoping maybe you'd be able to point me in the right direction. If you could give me a call back when you have a chance, there's a company we'd like to get some information on. If you don't know the answer, maybe you'd have an idea of who would. Anyway, I'll be in the office til three today. That's Mountain Time. Give me a call when you get a chance. Hope your summer's going well. All right then."
If I can save myself the 45 seconds it takes to listen to this kind of non-message, I'll take it.
GV Transcriptions are so useless I wondered if they even used the same back end as Google Now. Seems like Google is finally going to allow linking of the two backends to improve transcription accuracy.
Getting a text message in addition to an audio file for iOS will be nice. much quicker to read than to listen to a message. Lets just hope Apple is able to correctly transcribe the messages.
So you are saying that if you can't decipher a voice mail that a human programed voice recognition system could? Or that it would be worth your time to a garbled computer interpreted mess before you then listen to the actual garbled mess? You are now spending 2x the effort as before. My experience with Google Voice is that even a brief message in perfect clarity and diction get distorted:
Actual Message: Hey its Sam Brinkman. Give me a buzz when you get a sec. I'll be in the office all day.
Google Voice version: Hay is some brick man. Give me a bus when you get a sec. Aisle bee in the office all day.