Exchange 2010 speech-to-text

One of my favourite parts of being at Microsoft is seeing new technology first. Yes, I know, I'm a geek. I've been using, and enjoying, Exchange 2010 for several months.

Today, when you call my office line, your voicemail is forwarded to my mail as an audio file. I've long loved this feature, since it means that I can still easily get my voicemail when I travel (which is quite frequently). But there was still often a delay, as I had to wait until I had enough time or was in a location to be able to listen to the voicemail.

Now enter Exchange 2010, which improves on this. One of the new features in Exchange 2010 is voice mail preview. The attachment is still there if I want to listen to the message, but now the body of the message has a speech-to-text translation. It's not perfect, but it's generally good enough for me to figure out what action I should take.

What's been amusing are the cases where it's not 100% accurate. A couple of weeks ago, I called my manager and left voicemail for her. The translation was completely correct except for the introduction. I started off with, "hi Edie", which it translated to as, "hi baby". While I do like my manager quite a lot, we're not quite that familiar. Last week, when my mom called, it translated her "hi" into "Hawaii" (fitting, I suppose, since I recently got back from my honeymoon there).

Humourous translations aside, voice mail preview has turned into one of the biggest improvements in Exchange for me. I didn't think that I'd really care about this feature when I first heard about it. But in terms of regular usage, this translation means that I almost never listen to voicemails anymore. Reading the translation is so much more convenient and faster. I'd guess that the last ten times I listened to a voicemail were cases where I was showing the feature off to someone else, so let them compare the text preview with the audio.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2009
  Wow - how accurate is the speech to text for numbers?  The one thing I hate about voicemail is trying to decipher the numbers that callers leave.  (To the point that callers that block their caller ID will have to call me back at a more convenient time)

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2009
  You know, I'm not sure.  I just checked through all of the voicemails that I've received lately (I haven't deleted my trash in awhile, so there's a bunch in there), and none of the callers spoke their phone number.  My manager assumes that I know her number by now, I think. :)