In the near future, this may not be a Sprint only service. In an interview with Group Product Manager for Google Voice, Vincent Panquet, CNet has confirmed that they are in talks with other service providers to bring the service to more people.

“We are having discussions with other carriers about this,” said Panquet, though he did not mention any specific providers by name. I guess that eliminates any questions as to whether or not the Sprint agreement was an exclusive deal.

“Sprint integration has worked really well,” Paquet said to CNet. “We have, since Day One, had a steady stream of people signing up for it.”

Google Voice’s key feature is it’s voicemail transcription service, which allows you to view and manage your voicemail through your e-mail account, seeing the messages visually and eliminating the need to call your voicemail every time you have new messages.

The convenience of this unique feature may have been something that drew people towards Sprint when choosing a service provider. The company will now have to look to other services to set them apart.

If you are unfamiliar with Google Voice, this video shows you all you need to know.

It’s like they read the comment section of the Google Public Policy blog post about all this the other day. Their letter reflects some of the anti-Google sentiments there—especially the undercurrent of “Why are you stifling competition, Google?”:

Of course, as a company whose motto is “don’t be evil,” Google should have no objection to abiding by the Internet Policy Statement and other net neutrality principles it advocates with respect to Google Voice and all of the Internet-based services, applications and content that it offers. And as an agency committed to “preserving a free and open Internet,” the Commission should show no hesitation in ensuring its Internet principles are applied evenhandedly to the “network providers, application and service providers, and content providers” – including Google – who are expressly subject to them today.

As the Wall Street Journal aptly reported, however, the call blocking incident with Google Voice has exposed Google’s true agenda for adulterating the Internet Policy Statement: “The Internet giant wants cumbersome [net neutrality] rules applied to everyone—except Google.” In other words, Google wants the Commission to rig the game in its favor by rewriting the Commission’s broadband principles to cover only broadband Internet access providers, while giving Google a free pass to discriminate against whatever calls, websites, applications or content it pleases.

Don’t hold back, AT&T. Tell us how you really feel.

As I said MOnday, “While it’s no surprise to see AT&T and Google on opposite sides of a neutrality battle, the roles they’re cast in this time are at least a little humorous—Google as the one trying to restrict access and AT&T as the fair-minded, open-access alternative.”

What do you think? Is Google trying to evade neutrality, or keep costs down? Is AT&T the disadvantaged underdog or are they just trying to maintain their stranglehold?

Full text of the letter:
at-t letter to FCC over Google Voice Oct 14

Comments

The service looks a lot like Gmail for voicemail, although you don’t have to be a Gmail user to use it. It lets you retrieve transcripts of your voicemail, archive and search all your sent and received SMS messages, and you can make calls directly from Google Voice’s interface. The calls are free in the US, and cost a small fee internationally.

Watch this video from Google:

So here’s the really cool part for us writers…

You can call Google Voice and leave yourself messages.  Google will automatically transcribe the messages into text and email them to you!

So, next time you’re in the car or you just don’t feel like typing, you can simply call Google Voice and you’ll get your words emailed back to you.  How cool is that!!

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You might ask what this has to do with internet marketing, but I think you’ll find the exchange of interest.

First up, Blodget put up his thoughts on Google’s share price hitting $2000, giving it a market cap of $750+ billion.

Then Michael Arrington decided to voice his disdain for Blodget and his reckless valuation.

Not long after, Blodget blogged that he believed TechCrunch could sell for more than $100 million, possibly to CNET.

Lastly, Arrington (with tongue in cheek) took back his criticism of Blodget.

So, which do you think is more likely to happen? Google will reach $2000 a share, or TechCrunch will sell for $100+ million?

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Google Seeks Edge In Voice Traffic Talks

Job postings that appeared on MediaBistro at the end of July for Google indicate they are taking more aggressive stances in making deals for network services. Of particular interest: Google has tagged one of the two Strategic Negotiator positions as ‘Voice Focus – Global Infrastructure.’

Though Google has received attention recently for its proposed ‘white-label’ mobile phone hardware, we’ve always believed Google has much more in mind for wireless communications. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said several times the growth and revenue available through mobile has been part of the company’s strategy.

Even though the job title for one position has been labeled as Voice Focus, the job description reads far more generically when it comes to networking services. This is part of the description:

Negotiation and purchasing of IP transit services in North America, Europe, Asia, and/or Latin America; negotiation of partnerships with Internet exchanges, regional peering providers, and paid peering arrangements with major carriers.

Pretty common stuff, yet Google hints at deeper desires in the job title. We’re going to count this as another piece of speculative evidence that Google plans a challenge on the wireless industry. Imagine being able to pick up an iPhone-like mobile device that has its web and VoIP service supported by Google advertising, running on a Google-branded network.

Who could resist the price of free for service, along with a range of hardware delivered by Google’s partners in the wireless device industry? Google could become a global utility provider of wireless service, while selling mobile ads that Schmidt called “twice as profitable” as their non-mobile counterparts.

The submarine networking position doesn’t look as sexy as the voice focused one, but it’s just as important. Getting Internet traffic from continent to continent means sending it underwater. A truly global voice/VoIP solution means Google needs some favorable deals here as well.

So if you’re a Google AdWords advertiser, the Impression Metrics let you know how many times your ads were displayed relative to the total number of ad views across the Google network based on your keywords and campaign settings.

The Impression Share metrics are presented in 3 columns in the campaign or account level performance reports. The 3 measures as described in the Inside AdWords blog are:

Impression Share (IS): The percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting. This metric is available at the campaign and account level for search.

Lost IS (Rank): The percentage of impressions lost due to low Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score).

Lost IS (Budget): The percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints.

While having your ads displayed at every opportunity might not be your primary goal, the new metrics provide valuable insights into market trends and also give a better guide to lost opportunities due to quality scoring and budgets issues.

Ironically, it was only the other day that I was discussing the shortcomings of AdWords reporting on market shifts and budget performance with our own paid search expert. These new impression metrics will give us a more accurate guide on which factor is driving the performance of campaigns and accordingly react quicker to changes.

So if you manage your own Google AdWords campaigns, I recommend getting better acquainted with these new metrics, as they will certainly provide you with a much deeper understanding of changes in your campaign performance.

To find out how to include the new metrics in your reports, visit the Google AdWords help center.

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That would be a nice addition to the world of mobile computing – no more scrolling and clicking while driving just find out movie times, right?

There is a potential problem, though, and it’s Microsoft’s usual problem these days: Google. The search giant was granted a voice-recognition patent just last year, making it difficult to tell if Microsoft’s forthcoming product will amount to a violation (and a large payout for Google).

The mobile sector is set for some heated competition that will mirror the traditional online battle between two (or three, or four, or five) giants. While voice recognition technology is cool and all, it pales in comparison to the Microsoft’s Surface Computing future, which makes voice recognition seem decidedly low-tech.

Voice recognition is not nearly as impressive as what Google has in store for the mobile world either. So what if the search engine can understand what you say and search for it? Google’s system says it knows what you want to search for before you even know you want to search for it.

Skynet, here we come.

I used to work for a major telco (Verizon), and we had a number of researchers working on various voice recognition systems. I’ve also tinkered a bit with applications using text-to-speech voice synthesis software such as the AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech software, so I’m familiar with some of the issues that are commonly associated with these types of systems.

I was curious about whether Google’s clever engineers had perhaps improved upon some of the issues involved with having software recognize spoken words, and I also wondered how the quality was of their voice-synthesis.

I’ve seen lots of problems with such systems. Back when I worked for Verizon, many of our larger facilities had automated phone directories so that you could call into a central number, state the name of the individual you were seeking, and the system could automatically connect you. For simple names and straightforward caller voices, these systems worked pretty well. But, I witnessed a number of occasions when it worked frustratingly. For instance, one of the Russian-American technical directors I worked with retained a heavy accent from his home country, and the voice-recognition system constantly misunderstood him, despite the fact that the systems supposedly were built with heuristics so that they were supposed to auto-correct and improve over time. Didn’t happen.

Further, while I have no real accent at all, times when I would try to reach someone with an unusual name such as a Chinese coworker were equally frustrating. It wouldn’t matter if I used a Chinese pronunciation, nor American phonetic pronunciation — for some names the system simply wouldn’t work.

I’m also very sympathetic to disabled people for whom automated systems often offer the greatest hope for improved quality-of-life, but also often produce the greatest let-downs. My father, a dynamic and clever scientist in his heyday was eventually beaten down some by various diseases, including a stroke late in his life. The stroke took away most of the use of the left side of his body — arm and leg, particularly. After he had retired, he enjoyed using his computers a lot, but the loss of the use of one of his hands made every task far more time-consuming. His solution for this was the purchase of some voice-synthesis software, but the functionality was never all that great because his speech had been slurred some by the stroke. So, he often had to repeat commands, and correct stuff with his good hand. When he called into company service centers, the situation always seemed a bit torturous to me as well. His attempts to vocally navigate call trees were often error-prone, resulting in an even more frustrating process than the usual, never-ending maze of call trees.

Good programming is often about handling of all the exception cases and extremes that may impact any given system. Speech and understandability are complex problems, and they’re areas where fuzzy logic and adjusting recognition template tolerances may never work perfectly for all people (until or if we also can match up AI to the problem). Even so, the criteria of “how well does it function for extreme cases” should be applied to assess the quality of the system, and one would hope that it wouldn’t be easy to find places where the system fails.

To do this quick assessment, I first performed searches for stuff in Google Maps to see what results they have in their database. Google Voice Local Search is basically a voice recognition and voice synthesis interface that have been put on top of their regular Google Maps search engine and results. So, I wanted to compare the vocal search results with the browser search results.

To phone into 1-800-GOOG-411 (ignore the promotion-hyped prestige number and just use: 1-800-466-4411), I used Skype, which is a voice-over-IP internet phone service, and I loaded an extra piece of companion software, Pamela, to record the call. I was a bit nervous about this, because Skype calls can sometimes make one sound like they’re speaking from the inside of a tin can, but my connection’s sound quality seemed to be excellent. Pamela didn’t seem to start recording until the call was already underway, so the first thing you’ll hear is me stating the location for the search.

Here’s the results of my test calls into GOOG-411:

1. I called in and started out with a simple search combination. I specified the locality of Bryan, Texas. I then searched for “Plumbers”. Here’s the Google Map of Plumbers in Bryan. Heres the MP3 of my Voice Local Search. This was a good user experience. The service understood my verbal request, provided back the same search results as the browser-based Map Search, and communicated it out to me audibly in really very smooth voice synthesis.

2. Now I would challenge the system with a difficult query — one with a potentially hard-to-recognize city name, and then a challenging business name: Watanabe Yasuo (a florist) in Waipahu, Hawaii. I know from experience that Hawaii has some of the most unusual place names in the entire US, and proper names of Hawaiian natives and foreign immigrants make Hawaii a hotbed of cultural melting pots. Here’s the Google Map result for Watanabe Yasuo in Waipahu. Here’s the audio of my Voice Local Search for Watanabe Yasuo.

This was a bad user experience. Gratifyingly, it found Waipahu just fine — perhaps including the name of the state, Hawaii, helped in this respect. But it just couldn’t find Watanabe Yasuo. After repeating that name, I then reduced it down to just one term, Watanabe, and I tried to pronounce it as a midwestern American might – phonetically. Still no-go. Even more frustratingly, the service then said “Sorry we must have a bad connection – just call back and we can try this again. Good-bye!” It hung up on me! The connection wasn’t the problem, and it’s very frustrating to have it hang up on you like that.

3. I tried calling back and still couldn’t get it to recognize “Watanabe”. (MP3) I then used their option for typing just the first name in – which irritatingly and strangely didn’t locate it, either. I then searched for just “Florists in Waipahu“. This time it found Watanabe Yasuo as result number five. Amusingly, the voice synthesis pronounced the name pretty much the same way that I originally did. I can see this bemusing users, since they might assume that if it can pronounce the name correctly, it should be able to understand the name when pronounced the same way. Of course, the speech-recognition and voice-synthesis systems are separate, so this sort of scenario could occur frequently.

So, how did Google do on my limited test? Not very well over all. I can tell that they worked on the voice synthesis quite a bit — they’ve smoothed it out to pronounce names, addresses, and phone numbers really nicely, so I can tell they worked on fine-tuning the synthesis quite a bit. Just based upon this limited test, though, I can expect that it would be very easy to force the system to fail on recognizing place names and types of businesses or business names. I don’t have an unusual accent, so it’s disappointing that the system didn’t understand my request for “Watanabe”, even though it is an unusual name. If it fails on my voice so easily, imagine how it will work for people who have accents, slurred voices or lisps, or people who tend to speak very slowly.

This experiment could seem like a cheap shot on my part, since voice recognition is such a complex matter to accomplish. But, there’s always some high expectations when Google deploys something out, even if it is in beta release. I haven’t performed a comparison here with other services that provide automated 411 services, either, but I don’t feel that’s all that necessary, since I’ve seen a number of those services “in the wild” over time, and the GOOG-411 version isn’t remarkably better as far as I can see.

I like a lot of Google’s new services that they’ve rolled out — I’m using the Calendar daily, and I like Google Trends, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Maps, and the original Google Analytics. But, I have to give the 411 service a “C” or “D” grade. Why deploy something out, even in beta format, if you can’t do something that significantly improves upon the similar services already out there? This is a free service with no ads (so far), so perhaps the one benefit to users is that it’s a 1-800, toll-free directory assistance service. Unfortunately, the service is likely to be a disappointment for people with non-average-American voices.

Local Search is hard enough in many ways, and adding on the voice-recognition makes it even harder to produce good-quality results. So, I am sympathetic to the limitation of current technology.

With all of Google’s great work in information retrieval, I was disappointed with this – it doesn’t stand out from the crowd, and one suspects some of the other, older players out there may be doing a better job. There’s quite a bit of research going on in audio recognition and search — since 9-11, I’m aware of quite a lot of work going on through the CIA and other US government groups to automatically convert the audio streams of various “chatter” sources to text, which can then be searched upon for various suspicious word sequences. In this way, automated systems can be used to monitor input from countless wireless phone calls and landline calls, and a log of those matching on suspicious word sequences can be brought to the attention of human reviewers to try to identify potential terroristic activity. With so much funding support of this sort of research, one would hope that new vocal search services would really wow us with their quality.

I’d challenge Google to user-test this with more of the exception cases and extreme cases in order to get it functioning better for those with accents and voice problems. Disabled people need services like this to work dependably more than any other user group. Google has quite a lot of employees who are foreign-born and have accents, so they already have user groups that they could use as test subjects.

If you’re reading this and you have an accent, please try using Google Vocal Local Search, and then write about your experience on the Goog411 Group so that they can improve the service. They’ve also very generously provided their email address so that you can also contact them to relate your experiences.

I’d also be interested in hearing about other users’ experiences with this service, so be sure to tell us about it in the comments section of this post!

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Google’s Got The 411

Google Voice Local Search is an automated free service that offers information on local businesses. Users can search business listings by name or by category. The information provided on Google Voice Local Search is the same found on Google Maps.

Once a user has found a listing they can have the information sent to their mobile phone through SMS or they can be directly connected to the business free of charge, though your phone carrier may charge for the phone call or for receiving an SMS.

To access the service, users can dial 1-800-GOOG-411. Google cautions that the service is still in its experimental phase and may not be available at all times or work for all users. The service is offered only in English and in the U.S.

Surprisingly, the service is not ad supported and does not provide residential listings.

Google will be competing with similar services such as 1-800-YelloPages owned by AT&T, TellMe recently purchased by Microsoft and 1-800-Free411.

Danny Sullivan raises an interesting point about who is missing from the 411 markets.  "Yahoo is noticeably absent from the group and has speech assets and speech professionals working there (former Nuance employees). So this may prompt further attention to a voice-based local search offering at Yahoo."

It will be worth watching what kind of impact Google will have on other competitors and what users will think of their latest offering.

Avaya deals in “communications systems, applications, and services,” according to its website, and a couple of headers like “IP Telephony” and “Mobility” give an even more specific idea of what the company’s all about. And Avaya is, by all appearances, adding Google to its list of top priorities.

Geoffrey Baird, who has an extremely long title (“vice president and general manager, Appliances, Mobility and Small Systems Division, Avaya”), discussed the new arrangement. “Avaya is working with Google to accelerate the convergence of enterprise communications with Web services,” he said.

Then Baird took a moment to pat his company’s new friend on the back. “Google Apps Premier Edition offers a powerful set of APIs that enable us to create new solutions that can help small businesses make dramatic improvements in employee productivity and get more out of their communications investment – making both Web and communications content available over a PC, phone or mobile device.”

As excited as the Google and Avaya reps were, though, they weren’t on their own (which is to say, what the companies are doing has some merit, and isn’t just a business maneuver). Om Malik, while writing about the deal, described “marrying voice with IM, email, and presence applications” as “[t]he holy grail of integrated communications . . . a yet-unrealized promise . . . .”

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