Google Voice gets a server-side update to improve voicemail transcription

It’s not often that Google Voice gets an update of any kind – whether we’re talking about the web interface or the mobile apps, Google Voice seems embarrassingly neglected. That’s why today’s news is so attention-grabbing, even if it’s not particularly exciting: Google has announced a new automatic transcription method that will reduce transcription errors by 49%, resulting in better transcriptions for users of Google Voice, Google Voice Lite,  and even Project Fi.

Google calls the technology behind its improved transcription “long short-term memory deep recurrent neural network” (whatever that means), and to benefit from the improved voicemail transcriptions, users don’t have to do a thing. This is a server side change that will benefit all of us.

Google says it was able to improve its transcription thanks to the many Google Voice users who chose to share their voicemails with Google. (See, your generosity meant something after all!) Google says this is just the beginning, so hopefully more enhancements to Google Voice are on the way soon.

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