Playing with CallWave’s Vtxt service

A while back I got an email from a representative from Callwave, inviting me to use their new service. The basic idea behind their voicemail service, called vtxt, involves using voice recognition on your voicemail in order to send you a text message with a summary of the audio message.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Say for example you get a message from your Mom that’s very wordy, but she’s just really trying to get you to call her back:

Actual example message:

“Hi, This is Mom, I really want to talk to you so please call me back at 503 555 1212″

vtxt example translation:

“Hi, This is Mom, call me at 5035551212″

BUT, the vtxt speech recognition has a long way to go. Here are two actual messages and translations that vtxt has done for me recently:

Actual message from Josh:

“Hi this is Josh, call me”

vtxt translation:

“Hi, this is Josh, don’t call me”

What?! The Callwave service totally screwed that one up. Talk about technology having the power to fracture personal relationships

Here’s another message, this time from my buddy Michael:

“Hey this is Mike, just calling to see if you want to go on a bike ride”

vtxt translation:

“…call us if you wanna go to my grad later.”

Heh - Michael graduated college about two years ago

So as you can see, Callwave’s speech recognition has a long way to come before it’s personally useful. I know it’s a hard thing to do with less than acceptable audio from cell phones and what not. It’s pretty fun to see what funky text messages come across. Thank goodness I can call in and get the actual message.

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Posted in: daily stuff, voip, web2.0

Tags: callwave, callwave_service, daily-stuff, speech_recognition, text_message, voip, vtxt, web2.0

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 7:15 am and is filed under daily stuff, voip, web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Playing with CallWave’s Vtxt service”

Liz July 9th, 2007 at 10:16 am

That is pretty funny. I’d like to sign up just for the laughs. I got a good giggle from this post.

I used Callwave a loooong time ago when I used dial-up and had only one phoneline. It worked pretty good for what I needed it to do.

I’m surprised their still around!

Liz July 9th, 2007 at 10:17 am

Ugh. *they’re not their. sorry. I had to fix it.

Thomas Han July 9th, 2007 at 11:34 am

ha, that is pretty funny!

or as vtxt probably would’ve translated,
“hi, let’s party dummy” (now that would be mean…)

thx for a good laugh on Monday.

Peter July 26th, 2007 at 10:19 pm

Haha I can relate! I just started using Callwave widgets on my Mac just recently, like the texting widget and voicemail widget. But my relation to your wrongly transcribed messages comes from an app I used called Jott. Jott is a voice to text app that allows me to use my phone to message myself, a friend, or a group anything I want (with a 30 second limit). The recipient and I get a copy of the jott with option to hear the audio. The transcriptions have been 90 percent one the money! But sometimes you get the “what the hell? can they not hear me?” haha

Web Worker Daily » Archive PhoneTag Supports GrandCentral for Text-Based Voicemails « May 13th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

[...] have used a similar service from CallWave, with unfavorable results. Voicemails were interpreted incorrectly and if you simply relied upon the text summary of the [...]

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