Google Voicemail Errors Cut By Nearly 50%
When Google Voice first hit the scene as a way to transcribe your voicemail, it was hailed as both a massive technological achievement, and a total laughingstock. Finally, you could hear your voicemail transcribed instead of hearing someone (your aunt? Probably your aunt. Aunts love voicemail.) talk. Well, kind of. The poorly transcribed messages made for some good laughs, and then we moved on and went back to just voicemail. But Google Voice is still around, and it wants to win you back over. Google’s voicemail transcriptions have gotten an upgrade, and an effective one at that. Google claims that their newest update to Google Voice has cut down errors in the transcriptions by a whopping 49%. What you’ll now lack in hilarious misunderstandings, you’ll gain in actual messages!
Google Was Helped By Their Users To Improve Voicemail
To get to the bottom of what made Google Voice so bizarrely ineffective, Google actually asked some of their users to share voicemails. The Google Voice team went to work researching these messages, understanding the bigger reasons why it was doing a poor job of voicemail transcription. Eventually, they discovered a cause and set to work on rectifying it.
Google Voice Did Away With Keyword System
As it turns out, Google Voice’s method of spotting keywords simply was not a good enough method. Google has instead begun using deep neural networks, or DNNs, which they found to be a far more consistently effective tool for transcribing voicemails. However, DNNs were still a flawed system by themselves, unable to adapt to circumstances such as noises or an increased distance between the speaker and the phone. But these DNNs were also LSTM (long short-term memory). An LSTM uses something of a recurrent neural network (RNN) to learn. It adapts to the data it collects. It sounds amazing, but is still given a difficult process by Google Voice and needs more time to continue learning and adapting.
Google Voice Update Currently Available
If you already have Google Voice, good news: you’ve already done the work. You’ll receive the new update. Those who don’t have it but are interested can sign up for an account, or get a Google Voice Lite account if you want the voicemail transcriptions but not a new number.
