When I got my smartphone last August, one of the first things I did was install and setup Google Voice. It is, among other things, Google's version of what a lot of mobile providers call "Visual Voicemail". You can use it to do a lot of things, but I use it only as an alternative to traditional voicemail. When someone calls me and I don't pick up, Google Voice picks up and the caller leaves a message like usual. On my phone or on the web, I get the recorded audio of the message, plus it gets transcribed and put into easy-to-read text by good ol' Goog.
Well... more or less. The transcribing part leaves a little to be desired.
Here are some particularly poorly transcribed voicemails I've received in the past few months.

As you can tell, the transcription was not very helpful in making the decision as to whether or not to actually listen to the message. This next one is a bit better, but still confusing:

The one that I got most recently was indecipherable, even the audio portion. I get robo-dialed a lot and get a lot of wrong number calls (thus the reason for needing an easier way to sort through my voicemail without having to listen to all of them), but I still haven't figured out if this call was actually about.

















4 Comments:
I have no voice mail or answering machine on any of my phones. If I miss a call and I know the person / number, I can call them back. If I miss a call and I do not know the person / number, they can call me back (if they really were trying to call me and it wasn't a wrong number), and I can decide if I want to answer it when I don't recognize the name / number. Since the latter are usually solicitations, I save money by not answering.
No, I am not anti-social, why do you ask?
Kristina: No voicemail? Sounds like a brilliant idea.
I feel I am missing out... surely everyone deserves the right to a nonsensical answering machine robot person, this is just unfair!
I made fun of Google voice's transcriptions of my boss' calls on my blog, so now he leaves nonsensical voice mails on purpose. Serves me right...
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