TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Good Letter, Bad Pen

Kevin Fogarty | Date: 10-09-09 | Comments

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• Shifting from one medium to another can eliminate an incredible annoyance--or become one.
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  Good Letter, Bad Pen Bad Pen

• Good Letter, Bad Pen

   

  Converting a traditional task or technology from one medium to another can do more than just make radio play on a Web browser. Done right, it can change fundamental things about the way we work every day.

  Good Letter

  Half a century after Gutenberg designed a cheap printing press in 1440, the world changed from one in which even Cambridge University could only afford 122 books to one in which the whole classical canon had been translated and every college (and aristocrat) with any airs at all owned them.

  When the Internet, and then the Web, was invented and then commercialized in the late '90s—well, never mind. You know all that and have probably been Twittering about it from your iPhone for ages.

  One of the bits of nonsense that helped drive dot.com marketing plans was the Paradigm Shift—a phrase that means something much bigger than the introduction of Version 2.0 of the WidgetMaster, for which it was too often used.

  Shifting a paradigm is a change so fundamental it alters everything about the way a thing can be done, or even thought about. The printing press did that for books. The Internet did it for information.

  Now speech recognition is doing it for that time sink, voice mail.

  Despite enormous advances in the efficacy of speech recognition, Dragon NaturallySpeaking and its also-ran competitors have remained a niche market—largely because the brains of their customer base are too disorganized to dictate things that make sense without the thought-producing delay and correction typing requires.

  Its market is still growing, but not exploding. So Nuance, which owns Dragon, licensed its text-to-speech engine to telephone companies, including Verizon Wireless and Vonage, which offer it as a premium service to customers.

  If the person you are calling doesn't pick up, then leave a voice message and a Nuance server in the carrier's data center stores an audio file with one hand and transcribes the message with the other.  E-mail both to the customer and Vonage costs 25 cents apiece for a service that costs it almost nothing.

  That 25 cents buys asynchronicity for the customer, though. Remember having to dial in to your voice mail and listen to them one at a time as your correspondents hemmed and hummed their way through messages with 10 seconds of meaning and 2 minutes of speech?

  No more. Transcribe that message and you can get the gist (sometimes amusingly spelled, but usually with astonishing accuracy considering every time is a first-time encounter with that particular voice, as far as the software is concerned).

  It doesn't have to be perfect; you're not submitting the voice mail to the board. All you need to know is basically what the person said. Transcribed voice mail gives that to you without it costing you 2 minutes per message listening to a voice in real time.

  That's why computers were invented—to do the boring things we'd rather not do ourselves.

  Though it's unquestionably revolutionary, voice-to-text mail has kind of slipped into the real world under the general consciousness, as just one more smart thing the slowly improving phone systems can do. It's too good to have come from the carriers, though.

  Transcribed voice mail, which isn't quite ubiquitous in the business world but is available from most cell carriers and an increasing number of business and residential service providers, is a paradigm shift. It's a revolution that's unlikely to spark other revolutions, but is certainly going to save enough time and effort to make shifting media a rewarding experience.

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