TECHCRUNCH
CALLEY NYE
6 JULY 08
Instant messaging, a technology that actually predates the Internet, hasn’t seen too many changes over the years. The AOL Instant Messenger of today is not that different from the AOL Instant Messenger from 1997. There has been some new technology with the integration of instant messaging, VoIP, and webcam capabilities with services such as Skype
, but two things have remained the same. Voice chat has been real-time, and text chat has been near-real-time.
Say2GO, a new near-real-time voice messaging system, is attempting to change this. The new technology, they refer to as “voicing” is closer to voicemail than IM. The product, currently in limited beta, provides users the ability to send and receive voice messages that are transcribed using voice recognition and sent as both audio and text. The desktop client uses the Microsoft Speech API for the voice recognition element, so it is only available on Windows and XP users are required to download and install the client libraries from Microsoft. Without the voice recognition library, the client reverts to being a standard IM client with a neat clean interface such as the contact list being displayed in cover-flow style.
The idea and technology is still fairly new, and it shows. After spending 10 minutes to train both of our speech recognition libraries, Nik and I tested Say2GO and we saw very poor results. Nik said “Another test of the speech recognition software,” and it translated into “man another said the phone is the victim mission the way you read into.” I saw fairly better results but they were still off. I had said “Why did I spend ten minutes training this software,” and it translated into “why didn’t spend ten minutes training in software for.” Nik has a thick Australian accent and an absurdly loud fan on his computer, so that may have affected the transcription.