A screen cap from Siri

I’m interested to see if the new Siri voice command stuff on the iPhone 4S goes anywhere. I don’t think that it will, but it’s not because Android was there first or because I don’t think it works. It’s because I don’t think people will use it.

Yes, Android had voice commands first, but Siri is very different. It was created by a dedicated company based on military artificial intelligence research – not just a side project to take dictation. Siri was fully fleshed out before Apple bought it. Voice on Android works (if you speak slowly and clearly) but it isn’t “smart”. The breakthrough of Siri is that it works out what you want based on natural language and context, not keywords.

I don’t think people will use it for two reasons:

1. It won’t work in every environment. Too much background noise, other people talking, television/radio on, etc. If you have to make a conscious effort to change your environment to use it, then you simply won’t. It’s not so convenient if you have to step out of a room or switch something off and you can accomplish the same thing with a few taps.
2. People like their privacy. Artificial intelligence is compelling on television and in the movies because it is a trick to let the audience know what the characters are thinking. You are watching them problem solve.

In real life, people don’t want everyone else to know that they’re looking up restaurant reviews, creating an appointment to meet someone for dinner, or checking sports scores.

Voice interface and artificial intelligence are very powerful, but until you can subvocalize, I just don’t see it catching on.

This is the primary reason that I don’t think that computing in the living room on a TV work. People have an intimate relationship with their data and having the display across a room just feels too invasive. Sure, it works great to share Youtube videos with friends and do other consumption activities. But not research or creation.

Would you honestly feel comfortable writing an email across your living room where anybody could walk in and read it (or look in through a window).

Now how about on a train or in the office with everyone listening?

Edit: A counter argument from John Athayde on Google+

How about while you’re driving? How about if you’re in a private office?
I don’t think it will be ubiquitous, but I do think it will become more used, especially for certain circumstances.

My response

True. Baby steps. I just think for most people, if they don’t use a feature regularly, then they forget about it.
I’m very interested to see how it plays out and am envious that Apple bought it, when it was going to go multi-platform

Edit: The screen capture is from a series by Joshua Topolsky. The other queries he made are also excellent!

Certainly not mine any more!

A few months ago our websites underwent some significant down time. The dust has settled and my schedule has finally allowed a little time to write about it.

Here’s what went down: GoDaddy decided that something was wrong with one of my sites one day and initiated a move of my hosting account to the server ghetto. This is the place where misbehaving children are sent for a time out.

My dozen or so sites were reasonably up to date, but I immediately went to log in and update their code (several WordPress blogs that were in the middle of being consolidated under a single instance as well as some forums, photo gallery sites, etc.). I had never had any problems, so I wanted to check to make sure I wasn’t hacked or anything.

My sites were taken offline during the move to the ghetto, so I couldn’t check anything and people who tried to go to any of my sites got a big blank page. I called GoDaddy support to ask how long it would take, and they said the transfers usually take about 48 hours. I was only hosting around 8 gigabytes of data, so two days to transfer it in what should be a state-of-the-art gigabit per second data center baffled me, but I decided to wait it out and not argue the point.

I asked how long my account would stay on the ghetto server and they said a minimum of 30 days, then it would be reevaluated and moved back to the regular hosting server if everything was OK. I found this terribly insulting. Those ghetto servers are where hacked and infested accounts reside. They are given the least provisioned bandwidth since they are doing “naughty things”, but there is no way for me, a human person, to request my sites be checked and moved back in a timely manner. I get a 30-day “time out”, even though I installed from their tools, and stayed on top of patches. They wouldn’t even tell me WHAT my sites were doing that supposedly violated their terms of service and got me moved to the ghetto, just a generic “using too many resources” message. Did one of my sites just suddenly get too popular for them??

After waiting the 48 hours for transfer, my sites were still down. I called and they said that “something has gone wrong, we’ll look into it. Give us another 48 hours”. I gave it 24 and called back. Still no go. I called back every day. FOR.SEVEN.DAYS. A technician finally looked at their transfer script, fixed the hang up, and the sites finished the move to the ghetto.

Now that my sites were accessible, I checked them over, and nothing was amiss. A couple plugin updates, but nothing was tampered with, and there was no sign of anything going haywire. Things were slloooooooooooow though. I called support and got the runaround about having to wait the 30 days before they’d look at the site to clear it and then initiate the move out of the ghetto.

Screw that, I found another hosting company and had all of my sites moved away in a matter of hours and closed the GoDaddy hosting account.

Things go wrong sometimes, and the people on the phones are friendly and all, but 7 days to copy 8 gigabytes of data is insane. Moving you for no provable reason of wrong-doing is insulting. Leaving your sites on a festering hunk of silicon and steel with a bunch of degenerates for an arbitrary period of time for no reason other than “policy” is ridiculous.

On the recommendation of a friend I signed up for an account on imhosted.com and have been quite satisfied. There have been a couple minor down-time glitches, but all seems to be smoothed out now. I am getting to the point of seriously considering moving away from shared host plans to a dedicated VPS, so that will be the next bit of research to undertake.

GoDaddy’s marketing tactics have always left a bad taste in my mouth, but the prices were good, the bandwidth fast, and service prompt. A seven day outage and uncertain future stuck in the slow lane was enough to make me re-evaluate their value proposition and I am happy to say that the healthy amount of competition in the hosting space means I don’t need to take their guff!

Since my life started including portable gadgets I’ve been striving for the note-taking Holy Grail: write a note on any device I happen to be using and have that note automatically sync to all of the other devices. There are plenty of solutions for this, but they all have restrictions on what devices, operating systems, or file formats that they’ll work with.

I have finally struck a balance of tools that meet all of my requirements and it is as if a great weight were lifted from my idea-cluttered brain.

First, my requirements:

• Create, read and edit notes on:
  • Linux
  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Android mobile devices
• Synchronize said notes to all platforms
• Notes stored in a secure manner
• Notes backed up/archived and have revisions tracked
• Ability to export all of my notes so that I am never “locked in” to a single vendor or tool
• Ability to search through my notes
• Extra Credit: be free
• Extra Extra Credit: be open source
• Double Extra Bonus Credit: all notes use my own encryption keys

In pursuit of this tool I’ve tried Evernote, Tomboy, Google Docs, and older tools when I lived on a Palm Treo. As I said, each approach has it’s merits, but also has limitations that fall short of my requirements.

What I have ended up using is a combination of tools that surround the SimpleNote service. SimpleNote isn’t Open Source, but it is free. It is a very straight forward service with a good API. On the website you can securely create, view and edit notes through an SSL encrypted connection. You can tag your notes and share them with friends or family. You can search through your notes on the site or locally (more on that later) and all revisions are stored, so you can go back in the lifetime of any of your notes to see what changes were made and revert the changes if you want to.

One negative is that, as near as I can tell, your notes are not encrypted on their servers — so there is risk of your data getting accidentally leaked or stolen. I never keep anything terribly sensitive in my notes: no passwords, financial, or private data – just shopping lists, story ideas, and random notes of stuff to look into – so there would be low impact if my information got out. I wouldn’t be happy about it, since there are song titles, lyrics, and notes on stories in progress or planned to be written some day, but I’m willing to accept the risk.

SimpleNote itself is just a web site, but the API has made it possible for tools on different platforms to sync up to the mother ship. The website has a growing list of projects that use their API sorted by platform. They do offer a native application for iDevices and an official Android version is in the works.

My favorites are:

• Android: AndroNoter
  • Excellent syncing
  • Search Notes
  • Free, though not Open Source
  • Does NOT support note tags
• Linux: SimplenoteSync script
  • A perl script, so will essentially run on any platform with the proper perl libraries loaded
  • Syncs your notes into individual ascii text files
  • Free and Open Source
  • Sync only — does not support tags, search or any other features
  • All of the power of Linux can come to bear on your notes: grep, svn, VI, EMACS, gEdit.. they’re plain ascii files so the limits of what you can do with the files are endless
    • This allows me to automatically check all note changes into subversion and keep a local history of revisions on my own server. If Simplenote decides to shut down or go in a direction I don’t agree with, I’ll have all of my data (minus tags) so there is no vendor lock-in!
• Mac: Notational Velocity
  • Sync to a local database
  • Optional encryption of local notes
  • Intuitive search/create/edit interface
  • Completely keyboard driven, no need to click on buttons
  • Spotlight integration
  • Free and Open Source
• Windows: ResophNotes
  • Full tagging support
  • Import/export notes
  • Multi-pane format with notes list on left and content on right
  • Internal links between notes with [ and ] (wikilink style)
  • Self contained (portable) app option so you don’t have to install it. You can run it from a flash drive
  • Notes are stored inside of an xml file, but the content is encrypted
  • Option to save all notes as individual ascii text files
  • Free, but not Open Source

It’s certainly not a perfect solution. Notes are not encrypted end to end with my own keys and the tools on each platform are a bit different. But it covers enough of my needs to make me happy.

Actually, if Tomboy had a decent client on Android I would move 100% to it. I really like the consistent interface which is available for Linux/Mac/Windows. So far there is one Android project that enables you to sync and read your notes on Android, however you cannot create or edit them yet. Sadly the movement is very slow going as there are only a couple developers donating time to the project – but it’s getting there!

What are your favorite note taking / syncing tools?

A lot of friends have been buying Android devices. Naturally, one of the first things people want to know is “what is the best app to install?” This is an open question, of course. The answer depends on what you are looking to do and since there are so many apps out there, it owes a lot to personal preference.

I’ve sent e-mails to some friends with lists of applications that I like. I realized that it would be a lot more efficient to write up a blog post of what my favorite apps are and just point people to it.

Therefore, below are the “Apps I Can’t Live Without”. Well, mostly. I’ve divided them up into a couple different categories. One list of must-have apps. A list of games I enjoy. A list of techie apps that most people won’t be interested in. Finally a list of apps that I could live without, but are way cool – and lets face it, today’s devices have so much storage space that there really isn’t a reason NOT to install an app and try it out! All of the apps on these lists are completely free, ad supported, or have “lite” versions available.

I do intend to update this list from time to time. I am still rocking a hacked and modified T-Mobile G1, but with our contract coming up at the end of October I hope to upgrade to the new hotness. Some applications that don’t run well (or at all) on my current phone will get a good testing once I have a more capable device. – new hotness has been achieved: Viv and I now have the beautiful Droid X on Verizon. I can’t say enough good things about this device.. I’m in love with Android all over again!

Also, when I get time I’ll add in links or QRCodes to the apps so that they are easier to find and install.

One final note for people new to Android: unlike other devices Android has a full refund policy. You can get a refund for ANY app that you install if you don’t like it as long as you uninstall it within the first 24 hours (they just reduced this to 15 minutes ). So you don’t have to worry if there isn’t a demo or lite version of an app you want to try. Pretty sweet! On to the lists!

Apps I Can’t Live Without

• Alkido – ebook reader. Supports ePub format. Has catalog and download of thousands of creative commons and public domain books
• AppBrain – an app/website combination that lets you share your app lists and ratings with friends or the public. There is also a helper app called “Fast Web Installer” which lets you browse AppBrain from a computer and when you click the install link on the webpage the app will automatically be downloaded and installed on your Android device
• Astrid – a to-do application that will sync with a free “Remeber The Milk” online account so that you can view your to-do list either at your home/work computer and on your Android device. There is a GMail extension that will show your to-do list next to your Google Calendar on your computer
• Astro – manage files in your device’s internal memory or SDCard (copy, delete, etc.)
• AwesomeDrop – transfer any file from a computer web browser to your Android device. It really is awesome! (requires html5 capable browser)
• Barcode Scanner – Scan any kind of barcode. If it is a product UPC code then it will give you information on the product. If it is a 2D “QR Code” then it will either take you to the website/app store entry (easy application installs), add the contact information to your addressbook if it is a contact record, or show you the text that is encoded
• Barnacle Wifi Tether – use your phone as a “Mifi” sharing its data connection with other wifi enabled computers/devices. As far as I know this is separate from the Froyo tethering that wireless companies charge extra per month for. UPDATE: you have to have hacked your phone for this to work. Since I haven’t hacked my phone yet, I’ve started using EasyTether (below)
• BeerWhere – This app will show you where to find Craft breweries, pubs, and stores nearby. You can help by rating locations you find as well.
• Brewster – This is a great little database app that keeps track of your favorite beers. Each time you imbibe a brew you punch the name in and rate it. It will automatically populate the type, brewery, and ABV if it knows it. If that beer isn’t already in the database you can add in the details. You can keep friend lists and see how your friends rate the beers they’ve had. As you try unique beers that nobody else in the system has tried you get points and gain levels.
• Chrome to Phone / Phone to Chrome – combination apps/Chrome plug-ins that will automatically open webpages on your Android device from your computer and vice versa. Very hand for throwing a webpage or map to your phone on the way out the door
• DoubleTwist – A great media player/management application for your device. The cool thing is that there are applications available for your Windows or Macintosh computers to wirelessly sync your music collection and podcasts.
• DroidRecord – voice recorder for leaving yourself quick notes when you can’t type. Saves to your SDCard and can be played back on the device, or transferred to your computer
• EasyTether – This truly is easy! It doesn’t require hacking your phone, it’s free, and you don’t have to pay anything extra to your carrier! Just run this app, run a small program on your computer, and voila! you have wireless Internet access. The app gives you step by step links and instructions once you launch it.
• Fandango – Movie showtimes, theater information and reviews
• G-Notepad – Text editor that reads from/saves to your SDCard
• Lastpass – There are plugins for all web browsers and apps for all mobile operating systems. It stores all of your passwords and secure notes in an encrypted database. You only have to remember a single password to get access to your ‘vault’.
• Listen – Podcatcher/podcast listening app
• Pandora – streaming music service. Last.fm also has an Android app for those who prefer their service
• Power Control – widget that includes on/off toggles for Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, Sync, and Brightness in a single bar
• Ringdroid – chop MP3 files into ringtones
• RunKeeper – tracks walking/running/walking progress. Records distance, steps, calories burned, etc. and uploads it all to the website
• Seesmic – Twitter client. Easy to move between full timeline, replies, DMs, and lists. Good support for posting pictures or videos. Configurable URL shorteners and other 3rd party services. Until Tweetdeck adds lists support this will be my fav Twitter client for Android. I’ve switched to Tweetdeck, see details below
• ShopSavvy – scan barcodes and compare prices both online and at other local stores or add to wish-list for later research
• SwiftKey – replaces the on-screen keyboard. Scans through your SMS history to find your most used words and phrases, then uses those to help predict words as you type
• Tweetdeck – Twitter client. Initially I had preferred Seesmic, but it was getting rather flaky. It was timing out a lot when trying to refresh timelines and had problems uploading Twitpics (though that may have been the Twitpic service itself and not Seesmic). There are a few things that I don’t like about Tweedeck: there are only a few customizable settings (like for how many tweets to fetch when refreshing), you are forced to use YFrog and Bit.ly without custom accounts. Still, overall it is now my favorite Twitter client for Android.. as well as Windows, Mac, and Linux for that matter! I like having multiple columns for my lists as well as Facebook and Google Buzz. It is only their first release for Android, so I hope that in the future they will add more controls in settings and eventually global filters!
• UrbanSpoon – Are you hungy, but can’t decide where to go? Let UrbanSpoon decide for you! This is kind of like a slot machine. It does a quick check of your location and when you hit the switch it picks a random restaurant near you and give you the details about it. You can constrain any of distance, type of cuisine, or cost – or just let it all of them roll. If you know what you want, you can do a simple search and get the details on the specific restaurant.
• Waze – This is a great driving application. It gives you realtime traffic updates, points of interest, and turn by turn directions. It also includes several social gaming aspects. You can see fellow Wazers on the map and run over virtual objects in the road to receive points.

Favorite Games

• Angry Birds – the smash hit on the iDevices is now available for Android and it’s a blast. As they say, simple to learn, difficult to master. But you get to fling birds at pigs, so fun all around. If it doesn’t show up for you on the market it’s probably because your device doesn’t run Android 2.1 yet which is a requirement.
• Backgammon – decent  backgammon game
• Barrr – cute little game where you manage the resources of a pirate bar
• Cestos – online multiplayer game where you roll a little robot bug and try to blow up opponents
• Crystallight Defender – tower defense game
• Dominoe – three different dominoes variants
• Droid Dice – for the gamer on the road, let’s you quickly “roll” 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, 100 sided dice, or create your own random number range
• Frozen Bubble – shoot the same colored bubbles to remove them from the board. Likely familiar to Linux users
• Jewellust – A Bejeweled clone with lots of unique qualities
• Jewels – a simple, free, Bejeweled clone
• Light Racer – a clone of the Tron light cycle game
• Phit Reload – puzzle game
• Puzzles – a collection of simple and fun puzzle games. Ugly graphics though
• Scrambled Net – puzzle game
• Spaghetti and Marshmallows – A fun little game where you build structures out of dried spaghetti and marshmallows. If you’ve played World of Goo, this will be a natural for you!
• Super Froggy – Frogger clone
• WordFeud – they have Words With Friends on the shiny happy iDevices. Android users get down and dirty with Word Feud. Yeah, well, it’s silliness aside, this is a fun and well make Scrabble app which lets you challenge friends (or strangers) to a game. You can challenge me as “choochus”
• WordPress – if you have a wordpress blog, then you’ll love this tool to create posts and moderate comments on the go.

Techy/Geeky Apps

• AndFTP – if you ever need to do file transfers on the go
• AndroidVNC – VNC client to remotely control computers
• CIDR Calculator – for network geeks, this will calculat TCPIP CIDR addresses and subnet masks
• ConnectBot – a well featured SSH client for remote system administration
• GPS Test – get signal strength and statistics of all satellites your gps receiver can “see”. Will also give you altitude, speed and direction of your phone.
• Hex-Bin-Dec – convert between formats
• K9 Mail – a well featured POP/IMAP mail client with active development. For geeky bonus points, you can install APG which adds GPG encryption/decryption. And yes, it has a robot dog in the icon!
• OscanO Lite – scan a computer for open ports (nmap)
• Superuser Permissions – if you rooted the device, control what programs can run as Root
• WhatIsMyIP – tells you what your current Internet address is
• Wifi Analyzer – Does exactly what it says on the tin. Show channel, signal strength, and status of all wireless access points within range. This can help you pick the best one to join, as well as help you pick the best channel to set your access point to.

Apps I Can Live Without, But Are Still Pretty Cool

• Appolicious – analyzes all of the apps on your device and suggests other apps that you would probably like
• Converter – converts various measurements (wet/dry/temperatures/length/etc.)
• DiskUsage – shows you how much space is used on your SDCard
• FBReader – another ebook reader. Supports ePub, oeb and fb2 formats as well as access to 5 different Internet libraries (including Smashwords, though it’s a poor interface)
• Kindle – eBook reader. I haven’t bought any Kindle books, but I know a lot of people like it, so I thought I’d make sure people knew that it was available for Android. Apparently it hooks in with all other Kindle apps/devices so wherever you stop on one device, you can pick up on another one
• Missed Call – lets you customize the flashing LED (interval, colors) and sound notifications for missed events (calls, SMS, mail, etc.)
• My Tracks – uses your GPS to to give exportable tracker of where you’ve been. Useful for hiking, jogging, etc.
• Qik – live video streaming. Only usable if you are in 3G/4G or WiFi area (similarly there are now UStream and JustinTV apps if you prefer their services)
• Rockplayer – Plays many more movie/music formats than the built-in media player. Not the best interface

After almost 20 years of playing with myself, I’ve joined a band.

I’ve been twice married, lived in three different states, and had a son since the last time I played music with other people. It’s been a long road to get here, but it feels fantastic (even if a bit terrifying). The band in question is “Phil Rossi and the Awakening”, led by author and hoopy frood Phil Rossi.

We’ve got a live show at Balticon (in … five days! _gulp_) in which time I need to finish learning 13 songs with one full band rehearsal on Wednesday.

Yeah…. live without a net

Some history for those interested:

I started playing music when I was a kid. I don’t remember the age (probably 8 or 9) but we always had a piano in the house while growing up and I would sit at that piano and perform grand concerts. In my head they were grand, to anybody listening it was probably a cacophony of notes, hand slaps, and howls. My brother was an amazing guitarist and his strumming, singing, and full band rehearsals were a constant in my life.

When I got a little bit older my mom bought me a SynSonics drum pad and I spent countless hours hammering out drum beats. For a short time I played trombone at school before buying a bass guitar. I initially chose bass because everybody wanted to be a guitarist, or a singer, or a drummer. Why jump into something that’s going to be saturated with other people? This has actually served me well since you can usually swing a cat and hit a guitarist, but good bass players are harder to come by.

I came to realize later that I had a deeper connection to playing bass though. I’ve always been drawn to rhythm and percussion and bass is intimately tied to these. In high school I started jamming with friends. I also played around with my friends guitars, figuring out Metallica, Helloween, and Iron Maiden riffs. I had a decent knack for playing songs by ear. A friend of a friend came by my place to hear me play a little bass on a combo amp I had in my garage. He liked what he heard and invited me to try out for the band at his place.

In a classic scenario, I showed up and plugged into the current bass players rig (who wasn’t there at the time) and we played a couple tunes. They asked if I wanted to join the band and called him to come and get his stuff! We played together for several years and enjoyed a decent amount of success. Through circumstances I won’t go into now, we missed out on a possible recording deal and shortly thereafter the band broke up. Well, a member of the band left anyway and the rest of us wanted to start something new, rather than continue on with the old name.

We played together in side projects and substituted in friends bands when they had members out sick or whatever but didn’t make any significant progress. Not to say we didn’t have a great time and write some awesome songs! But we grew up.. and I ended up getting married and moving out of state.

That was the last time I played with anybody. And since bass is pretty damn boring to play alone, I largely abandoned it. I continued to fiddle with music off and on, playing electric guitar, programing drum loops and virtual synth instruments, but it was always a back-burnered activity, falling behind other pursuits.

Lately I’ve been embracing the creative – largely due to urging and inspiration from my wife – I’ve been writing fiction, I’ve been writing music, and I’ve been reaching out to other artists. The opportunity came to play with Phil and though it seemed like things would never line up, I made it over for a jam session and it was exhilarating. I felt like I could barely string two notes together for a bit as I was clearing out the cobwebs, but Phil and his drummer Keith were very encouraging and complimentary and it was a blast.

That’s my story.. no morals, no big take away.. Just, I’ll never forget the strength of a loving partner, and will cherish the communion of a rock groove with a group of like minded explorers. I can’t wait to get to the next practice!

Just a quick plug for a web event happening next week called The Boom Effect. The event will start on Saturday, February 27th at 10AM Eastern time via UStream.

This charity drive is a live, online auction to raise money for the trust fund of Tee Morris’ daughter who lost her mother on January 5, 2010. There will be at least 5 hours of entertainment hosted by Podcasting’s Rich Sigfrit. We’ll be in the live audience cheering everybody on, and likely on camera on the main feed as well. It’s shaping up to be a really fun time. You’ll be able to bid from the chat room, through e-mail, proxy-bid on the website, and I think via video or audio on Skype or UStream.

And with over 70 items up for auction (so far!!) there is something for everyone to get excited about and bid for! Everything from jewelry, to pictures, paintings by celebrities, custom music, book dedications, food, clothes, signed DVDs and books, knitwear, and even Mozart’s Balls!! Seriously, go check out everything up for auction!

Hope to see you there!

I’m gonna go ahead and delete the Twitter archive posts. I think it just clogs everything up and if people want to see what I’ve written on Twitter, then they’ll either follow me, or see it on Facebook.

During one of our panels at Balticon Thomas Gideon and I were speculating on automated transcription and the idea came out to try Google Voice (previously called Grand Central). I happen to have a GV account, so I agreed to give it a shot.

I had time this morning, so I made some attempts. In short, it didn’t work.

I’m not entirely sure why it didn’t work. As I play back the recordings that were made, the volume seems ample. The podcast recordings come across like somebody on a speakerphone, which I think would be a common practice for somebody calling you from a car.

It may be that Google hasn’t tackled taking on multiple voices yet and simply cancels the transcription process when a certain percentage of the attempt fails. My control recordings show that a short message transcribes well (even if all words aren’t 100%), but when I make up a bunch of words the transcription is “not available”.

It is also possible that it is just the phone I was using. I’ve received a few voicemails from people “in the wild” and the transcription was much more accurate. I’d say around 95%, where even the successful control test totally munged the end of the quote.

Here are the files and results:

• Control recording which was successful
  • Transcription text: “hi presented quotes by thomas jefferson a government big enough to supply you with everything you need is the government big enough to takeaway everything that you have the courses history shows that i got a very close to pretty decreases”
• Control recording which was unsuccessful
• ITB recording which was unsuccessful
• TheCommandLine recording which was unsuccessful. (excerpted from his show released May 7, 2009).

If you have an idea of a different approach let me know and I’ll be happy to try it!

With all that being said:

As a traditional voicemail service Google Voice absolutely rocks and the transcription is really cool. Above and beyond the actual coolness of having a transcription of people’s voicemails, the web interface is very slick in how they are presented. The text of the transcript is just below the audio transport bar.

Sample of a Google Voice transcription

Words that Google thinks it got correct are traditional black text. Words that it wasn’t sure of are gray. As you play the voicemail it actually highlights each word as they’re spoken and if you click and drag the progress pointer the word highlights follow the movement. Very slick.

Perhaps Google may shoot off an automated transcription service. I’m sure it would be in support of audio web searches, with inevitable Adwords, of course. It sure would make a lot of podcaster’s lives easier!