Google Voice: enabling you to shame those drunk dialers
If you don’t know what it is, Google it.
There are plenty of awesome features, but two in particular stood out:
- the ability to email OR embed both voicemails AND phone calls (google voice lets you record a conversation while it’s in progress)
- the ability to have those recordings transcribed.
Sure, you could do this before with some external recording device and some fancy software…but now it can be done with ease.
Should this become widely adopted, it’ll threaten one of the things I like most about phone communication which is also one of the things I hate the most: the words drift off into the ether…
I’ve been on a call many times and thought, “Damn it. All this information won’t be indexed and searchable later. I should ask this person to get on instant messaging.” Google voice, with its transcription feature, solves this problem.
But…I’ve also been composing an email many times and thought, “I wish I could be less careful with my words. Why, oh why, do I feel the need to rewrite the same sentence 5 times?” Knowing that a voicemail I leave (or a phone call that’s being recorded) could easily be embedded on a website and shared across the world will drive me insane. You’ve seen what this does to weather men, right?
I have no concluding thoughts.
Oh, below is an embedded voicemail I left for myself. Google transcribed it as,
“hi greg this is yourself and you’re testing google voice right now i wanna they can do a good job transcribing this message if they don’t it’s okay that most awesome company in the world i love you google “
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