Best of the Best: Google Voice

As I've commented to Rachel and perhaps a few others, I find that Google Voice's voicemail transcription service is a pretty interesting way to determine how clearly a person is able to enunciate. Until today, I had not managed to get a perfect transcription, whether it was due to signal interference or people talking at a non-optimal volume, speed, etc. The closest I got was with Josh, which I randomly attribute to the speaking skills necessary to be an effective psychologist. There were only two words that got mis-transcribed in his 18-second voicemail to go see Starts No Exit, but were minor enough that it didn't really alter the grammatical structure or understanding of the entire message. Great job, Josh!

However, the honor of perfect transcription goes to my dad, for his short, 7-second voicemail he gave me today briefly telling me to call him back. When I caught the SMS notification with transcription, it just seemed impossible that there could have been an error, and upon playing back the message, I was pleasantly surprised. Hopefully, this phenomena won't be extremely rare, and either Google or my friends and family will step up to make transcription more useful to me in the future (because sometimes, the messages are just too ridiculous).