Technology continues to advance.
I am posting this along with the photo from the middle of the Caribbean using my MacBook Pro.
Observations Cafe
I placed my first call from the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean in 2005 from the deck of the Queen Mary 2 using Skype and my previous Mac laptop.
Today I placed my first Google Voice call from my gmail account from the ship’s satellite based wi-fi network.
It this doesn’t illustrate how connected and digital the world is – I don’t know what does.
Call phones from Gmail for FREE to the US & Canada. Learn more at gmail.com/call
I have already received the call icon in my Gmail account and made several calls.
Make Phone Calls From Gmail
My gmail phone account automatically syncs with my Google Voice account ANI which shows my name & phone number in Caller ID on calls I place from Gmail.
Cool!
Google Voice automatically transcribes voicemail messages so Google Voice users 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.
According to the Google Voice blog:
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.
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. You have three options:
Google Voice Transcription Quality
Messages donated to Google may be listened to, manually transcribed and/or used to gauge transcription improvements over time, but will never be made public or used for any other purpose than improving the transcription quality.
My experience with Google Voice transcriptions has been surprisingly accurate compared to the other voice to text transcription services I have tried.
I have donated the transcript below to help Google Voice improve its transcription accuracy.
Google Voice Transcript Donation
Today I noticed I could append voice mail messages left in my Google Voice mail account by clicking on the speaker icon next to the message sender’s number.
Google Voice Number Recognition
Clicking the add link opens a text box to type in a name for the phone number.
Add Name to Number
Pressing Create/Add saves the “Name” entered for identifying all future voice mail or text messages originating from the same telephone number.
Today I noticed a feature I hadn’t yet seen in my Google Voice account: Google Voice accounts can have the text messages they receive “returned” with a telephone call set up by Google Voice.
Google Text to Voice Call
After a text message has been received, Google Voice will call you and connect you to the text message senders phone. Pretty cool.
Hopefully, Google Voice accounts will eventually see all of their voice account functionality embedded within their gmail account’s user interface.
Today I learned updating your Google Local Business Center account details and submitting them causes the account to lose access to Google’s Local Business Center listing performance data.
Before Google Local Business Center Changes
As you can see above, the initial account login provides Impressions and Actions data.
However, after I submitted a mobile telephone number change to include my Google Voice number, the top level data and the underlying Analytics all but disappeared.
After Local Business Center Changes
Tim Cohn Flickr Feed
@TimCohn | Author Tim Cohn's Blog 