I noticed some text on a convenience store sign that I wanted to comment on in a status update on my various social network sites. Since I was driving at the time, the quickest & safest way to make sure I'd remember it later was to call myself and leave a voice mail:
Seen on a convenience store sign: Get Ice Cold Ice Here. Really. Ice Cold Ice, huh? That's pretty novel, people.
My voice mail provider is Google Voice, a free service with multiple awesome features. One of the awesome features is that it will send you text messages and / or emails informing you of new messages, and optionally include a transcription of the voice message. Sometimes the sound quality isn't quite up to snuff, and the transcription engine gets things a little wrong. Or more than a little. The transcription of the above quoted message was:
See you on a convenience store so. Alright get. I just called He's here billy. I just called. I saw that's pretty novel people. Bye.
I'm used to the transcriptions not being 100% accurate, but there is usually enough right for me to get the gist of the message without listening. Not this time. If someone else had left the message, anyway.
Maybe this speaks more to some speech impediment I have than to defects in Google Voice. I'll let you decide: google-voice-message-20100429-0932.
Regardless, I really do like the service and wouldn't give it up, I just found the transcript amusing in how bad it was in this case.
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