Google Wants your voicemail messages to improve!

As posted on the official Google Voice Blog, in an effort to further improve Google Voice’s voicemail transcription capabilities, Google is asking for users’ help. Previously, a user could check a box, letting Google know how useful the transcribed message was. Now, when you check one of those boxes, Google will ask if you’d like to donate the voicemail to them in order to help improve the service. This would give Google the rights to listen to, manually transcribe, and use your message to see how accurate their system is performing.

“Google Voice automatically transcribes voicemail messages so you can get a sense of what messages are about without needing to listen to them. The automated process sometimes works great, sometimes not so well. But we’re committed to making it better. After all, my friends don’t call me “ten cent” in real life!

There are many variables that influence the quality of transcripts, from background noise, to caller accent, to connection quality, and more. Having a pool of messages that can be used to gauge accuracy is very useful in that respect.

And this is where you can help by “donating” some of your voicemail messages. Until now, the only feedback you could give was to let us know if the quality of the transcript was good enough to be useful or not, by checking the corresponding box next to the message. You can now go one step further by letting us figure out why it was good or bad. When you rate a transcript, you will be asked whether you would like to donate the message “