Voicemail transcription - funny, but useless

[shadowfax]

I know the voicemail transcription service is a Microsoft API, so don't want 3CX to take this to heart. I had no problems getting it to work - this is about the quality of its transcriptions.

Does anyone else find it absolutely useless? Actually not useless - we find it hilarious, cheers us up.

Take these examples:

"Hello cortana can you fly faster than a centre am I need to sort out a password reset please could you contact"
(Cortana comes up quite frequently)

"What's the time? Oh shut the f*** system chrome. How about? Home."
(It is 6pm, we've gone home. Don't take it out on Chrome.)

"Hello my name is campaign should I book tickets for dipressed I have remote access to the best computer on some reason my outlook. Get off my screen in the last thing for 3 days. Play am old."
(Wouldn't book tickets, reviews were bad.)

"Pirates of Brenda"
(I've meet Brenda - no eye-patch or parrot, she is near the sea though)

Is it just that our users have British accents or does everyone else get similar amusing results?

Regards,

Adam

 

[Mark_M]

Yes, we have had many odd transcripts, I have had staff ask that I do not disable it as they quite enjoy reading these emails.

I recently changed the API setting from UK to US to see if it makes any difference, no one has emailed me this week but too early to say if it has made a difference.

On a related note, I did get an email today (from MS Azure) to say that we should start looking to migrate from Bing Speech API to Speech Services as from the 15th October 2019, Bing Speech will be retired and will no longer be available.

 

[cobaltit]

Yes the accuracy is not very good but I can usually get the gist of the conversation along with some amusing bits. This recent one was pretty funny and I think we can all related to the last sentence.

Yes hello my name is salad or bread from crying from robling contract ING. We actually have a dump site at for one of your contractors and we want to see if we can get it to print or something wrong with you guys is not working. Right now there's a point there but I don't believe is able. Kitchen so we can discuss how we can get this working I can breathe and I want sex. 99833 5 thank you.

 

[VoIPTools]

This is a very, very difficult nut to crack. We have tried many, many, many different engines and Bing is about as good as any we have tried.

Part of the challenge is the quality of the original voicemail recording. The codec 3CX uses is simply too compressed for the engines to successfully transcribe the voicemails with a high degree of accuracy.

Until 3CX changes the codec used for voicemails, we will have to live with limited accuracy of transcriptions or hope we can find an engine that can handle the low-quality recordings. I've not been able to find one that can do it accurately and I've been searching for years.

If anyone out there can find a good, reasonably priced, engine that can handle 3CX voicemails, let us know and we will see about incorporating it into our Voicemail Manager add-on for 3CX.