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iPhone 4 gets competition

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

When the iPhone came out it redefined what a smartphone is. The others scrambled to catch up, and now with Android they pretty much have. The iPhone 4 is not in a different league from its competitors the way the original iPhone was. So I have been trying to decide between the iPhone 4 and the EVO for a while. I didn’t look at the Droid X or the Samsung Galaxy S, either of which may be better in some ways than the EVO.

Each hardware and software has stronger and weaker points. The Apple wins on the subtle user interface ingredients that add up to delight. It is a more polished user experience. Lots of little things. For example I was looking at the clock applications. The Apple stopwatch has a lap feature and the Android doesn’t. I use the timer a lot; the Android timer copied the Apple look and feel almost exactly, but a little worse. It added a seconds display, which is good, but the spin-wheel to set the timer doesn’t wrap. To get from 59 seconds to 0 seconds you have to spin the display all the way back through. The whole idea of a clock is that it wraps, so this indicates that the Android clock programmer didn’t really understand time. Plus when the timer is actually running, the Android cutely just animates the time-set display, while the Apple timer clears the screen and shows a count-down. This is debatable, but I think the Apple way is better. The countdown display is less cluttered, more readable, and more clearly in a “timer running” state. The Android clock has a wonderful “desk clock” mode, which the iPhone lacks, I was delighted with the idea, especially the night mode which dims the screen and lets you use it as a bedside clock. Unfortunately when I came to actually use it the hardware let the software down. Even in night mode the screen is uncomfortably bright, so I had to turn the phone face down on the bedside table.

The EVO wins on screen size. Its 4.3 inch screen is way better than the iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen. The “retina” definition on the iPhone may look like a better specification but the difference in image quality is indistinguishable to my eye, and the greater size of the EVO screen is a compelling advantage.

The iPhone has far more apps, but there are some good ones on the Android that are missing on the iPhone, for example the amazing Wi-Fi Analyzer. On the other hand, this is also an example of the immaturity of the Android platform, since there is a bug in Android’s Wi-Fi support that makes the Wi-Fi Analyzer report out-of-date results. Other nice Android features are the voice search feature and the universal “back” button. Of course you can get the same voice search with the iPhone Google app, but the iPhone lacks a universal “back” button.

The GPS on the EVO blows away the GPS on the iPhone for accuracy and responsiveness. I experimented with the Google Maps app on each phone, walking up and down my street. Apple changed the GPS chip in this rev of the iPhone, going from an Infineon/GlobalLocate to a Broadcom/GlobalLocate. The EVO’s GPS is built-in to the Qualcomm transceiver chip. The superior performance may be a side effect of assistance from the CDMA radio network.

Incidentally, the GPS test revealed that the screens are equally horrible under bright sunshine.

The iPhone is smaller and thinner, though the smallness is partly a function of the smaller screen size.

The EVO has better WAN speed, thanks to the Clearwire WiMax network, but my data-heavy usage is mainly over Wi-Fi in my home, so that’s not a huge concern for me.

Battery life is an issue. I haven’t done proper tests, but I have noticed that the EVO seems to need charging more often than the iPhone.

Shutter lag is a major concern for me. On almost all digital cameras and phones I end up taking many photos of my shoes as I put the camera back in my pocket after pressing the shutter button and assuming the photo got taken at that time rather than half a second later. I just can’t get into the habit of standing still and waiting for a while after pressing the shutter button. The iPhone and the EVO are about even on this score, both sometimes taking an inordinately long time to respond to the shutter – presumably auto-focusing. The pictures taken with the iPhone and the EVO look very different; the iPhone camera has a wider angle, but the picture quality of each is adequate for snapshots. On balance the iPhone photos appeal to my eye more than the EVO ones.

For me the antenna issue is significant. After dropping several calls I stuck some black electrical tape over the corner of the phone which seems to have somewhat fixed it. Coverage inside my home in the middle of Dallas is horrible for both AT&T and Sprint.

The iPhone’s FM radio chip isn’t enabled, so I was pleased when I saw FM radio as a built-in app on the EVO, but disappointed when I fired it up and discovered that it needed a headset to be plugged in to act as an antenna. Modern FM chips should work with internal antennas. In any case, the killer app for FM radio is on the transmit side, so you can play music from your phone through your car stereo. Neither phone supports that yet.

So on the plus side, the EVO’s compelling advantage is the screen size. On the negative side, it is bulkier, the battery life is less, the software experience isn’t quite so polished.

The bottom line is that the iPhone is no longer in a class of its own. The Android iClones are respectable alternatives.

It was a tough decision, but I ended up sticking with the iPhone.

Posted in Apple, Clearwire, Google, Sprint, iPhone, phones, review, smartphone | No Comments »

VoIP over the 3G data channel comes to the iPhone

Friday, January 29th, 2010

I discussed last September how AT&T was considering opening up the 3G data channel to third party voice applications like Skype. According to Rethink Wireless, Steve Jobs mentioned in passing at this week’s iPad extravaganza that it is now a done deal.

Rethink mentions iCall and Skype as beneficiaries. Another notable one is Fring. Google Voice is not yet in this category, since it uses the cellular voice channel rather than the data channel, so it is not strictly speaking VoIP; the same applies to Skype for the iPhone.

According to Boaz Zilberman, Chief Architect at Fring, the Fring iPhone client needed no changes to implement VoIP on the 3G data channel. It was simply a matter of reprogramming the Fring servers to not block it. Apple also required a change to Fring’s customer license agreements, requiring the customer to use this feature only if permitted by his service provider. AT&T now allows it, but non-US carriers may have different policies.

Boaz also mentioned some interesting points about VoIP on the 3G data channel compared with EDGE/GPRS and Wi-Fi. He said that Fring only uses the codecs built in to handsets to avoid the battery drain of software codecs. He said that his preferred codec is AMR-NB; he feels the bandwidth constraints and packet loss inherent in wireless communications negate the audio quality benefits of wideband codecs. 3G data calls often sound better than Wi-Fi calls – the increased latency (100 ms additional round-trip according to Boaz) is balanced by reduced packet loss. 20% of Fring’s calls run on GPRS/EDGE, where the latency is even greater than on 3G; total round trip latency on a GPRS VoIP call is 400-500ms according to Boaz.

As for handsets, Boaz says that Symbian phones are best suited for VoIP, the Nokia N97 being the current champion. Windows Mobile has poor audio path support in its APIs. The iPhone’s greatest advantage is its user interface, it’s disadvantages are lack of background execution and lack of camera APIs. Android is fragmented: each Android device requires different programming to implement VoIP.

Posted in AT&T, Apple, VoIP, Wi-Fi, dual-mode, iPhone | No Comments »

AT&T to open wireless data channel to VoIP

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

In an earlier post, I discussed a comment AT&T made contemplating allowing VoIP on the cellular data channel. Today AT&T wrote a letter to the FCC saying that they have decided to go ahead with it.

This will make international calls much cheaper for people who are willing to put up with the latency issues of the data channel.

Posted in AT&T, FCC, VoIP, cellular, controversies, iPhone | No Comments »

Apple’s App-roval process

Friday, August 28th, 2009

I wrote earlier about AT&T’s responses to FCC’s questions concerning the iPhone App Store and Google Voice.

Now Apple has posted its responses to the same questions, which are basically the same as AT&T’s. Among the differences are that Apple’s responses contain some hard numbers on its controversial App Store approval process:

  • 80% of applications are approved as originally submitted.
  • 95% of applications are approved within 14 days of submission.
  • 65,000 applications have been approved.
  • 200,000 submissions and re-submissions have been made.
  • 8,500 submissions are coming in each week.
  • Each submission is reviewed by two reviewers.
  • There are 40 reviewers.

These numbers don’t really add up. So what Apple probably means is that 95% of the applications that have been approved were approved within 14 days of their final submission. Even so, each reviewer must look at an average of 425 submissions per week (8,500*2/40), which is 10 per hour per reviewer – an average of 12 minutes of reviewer time per submission, which doesn’t seem to justify the terms “comprehensive” and “rigorous” used in Apple’s description of the process:

Apple developed a comprehensive review process that looks at every iPhone application that is submitted to Apple. Applications and marketing text are submitted through a web interface. Submitted applications undergo a rigorous review process that tests for vulnerabilities such as software bugs, instability on the iPhone platform, and the use of unauthorized protocols. Applications are also reviewed to try to prevent privacy issues, safeguard children from exposure to inappropriate content, and avoid applications that degrade the core experience of the iPhone. There are more than 40 full-time trained reviewers, and at least two different reviewers study each application so that the review process is applied uniformly. Apple also established an App Store executive review board that determines procedures and sets policy for the review process, as well as reviews applications that are escalated to the board because they raise new or complex issues. The review board meets weekly and is comprised of senior management with responsibilities for the App Store. 95% of applications are approved within 14 days of being submitted.

Of course much of this might be automated, which would explain both the superhuman productivity of the reviewers and the alleged mindlessness of the decision-making.

Posted in AT&T, Apple, FCC, controversies, iPhone | No Comments »

AT&T, Apple and VoIP on the iPhone

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

The phone OEMs are customer-driven, and I mean that in a bad way. They view service providers rather than consumers as their customers, and therefore have historically tended to be relatively uninterested in ease of use or performance, concentrating on packing in long checklists of features, many of which went unused by baffled consumers. Nokia seemed to have factions that were more user-oriented, but it took the chutzpah of Steve Jobs to really change the game.

A recent FCC inquiry has provoked a fascinating letter from AT&T on the background of the iPhone and AT&T’s relationship with Apple, including Voice over IP on the iPhone. On the topic of VoIP, the letter says that AT&T bound Apple to not create a VoIP capability for the iPhone, but Apple did not commit to prevent third parties from doing so. AT&T says that it never had any objection to iPhone VoIP applications that run over Wi-Fi, and that it is currently reconsidering its opposition to VoIP applications that run over the 3G data connection. Since the argument that AT&T presents in the letter in favor of restrictions on VoIP is weak, such a reconsideration seems in order.

The argument goes as follows: the explosion of the mobile Internet led by the iPhone was catalyzed by cheap iPhones. iPhones are cheap because of massive subsidies. The subsidies are paid for by the voice services. Therefore, AT&T is justified in protecting its voice service revenues because the subsidies they allow had such a great result: the flourishing of the mobile Internet. The reason this argument is weak is that voice service revenues are not the only way to recoup subsidies. AT&T has discovered that it can charge for the mobile Internet directly, and recoup its subsidies that way. It will not sell a subsidized iPhone without an unlimited data plan, and it increased the price of that mandatory plan by 50% last year. Even with this price increase iPhone sales continued to burgeon. In other words, AT&T may be able to recoup lost voice revenues by charging more for its data services.

This is exactly what the “dumb pipes” crowd has been advocating for over a decade now: connectivity providers should charge a realistic price for connectivity, and not try to subsidize it with unrealistic charges for other services.

Posted in AT&T, Apple, FCC, VoIP, Wi-Fi, controversies, iPhone | No Comments »

Tsera, LLC v. Apple Inc. et al. Patent troll?

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Here’s a little fairy-tale about what might have happened: Chuang Li took an idea to his boss at Actiontec who determined that it wasn’t of interest to the company and told him the idea was all his if he wanted to pursue it. Chuang ultimately refined the idea into the user interface that would become ubiquitous on MP3 players. The Patent Office rejected his application on a technicality. Chuang labored for years patiently jumping through hoops for the patent examiner while educating him on the validity of his claims. When the patent was finally issued, Chuang took it to Apple and requested a reasonable compensation for his idea. Unable to reach agreement with Apple after five years of effort, Chuang found a reputable firm of New York lawyers who were willing to take the case on a contingency basis.

Now here are some facts: the slashdotscape is alive with outrage about another patent lawsuit, this time filed by a company called Tsera LLC against Apple and 18 other companies over a touchpad interface to personal media player type devices (iPods).

Tsera was formed a couple of weeks ago on July 10th, and has filed no ownership or officer information with the Texas Secretary of State. Its registered agent is National Registered Agents, Inc. of New Jersey. Five days after the company was formed, Chuang Li, the inventor of US patent number 6,639,584 assigned that patent to Tsera. That same day Tsera filed suit in the notorious U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Tsera’s attorneys are Kaye Scholer LLP of New York (specifically James S. Blank, Patricia A. Carson, Leora Ben-Ami, Oliver C. Bennett and Tsung-Lin Fu.) Tsera’s local counsel are Jack Wesley Hill and Otis W. Carroll of Ireland, Carroll and Kelley, P.C. of Tyler Texas.

The complaint reveals that Tsera has no parent corporation, and that no public company owns 10% or more of its stock.

The original application for patent 6,639,584 was made exactly ten years ago, on July 29, 1999. At that time (and still) the inventor, Chuang Li was apparently working for Actiontec Electronics, Inc. of Sunnyvale, CA. Chuang Li did not assign the patent to Actiontec, although other patents he applied for around that time were assigned to Actiontec. Companies like Actiontec normally require their workers to assign all the intellectual property they generate, especially when it is relevant to their business. Actiontec makes an MP3 player called the PocketRave.

Chuang Li’s application was rejected on October 9, 2001, just two weeks before Apple launched the first iPod (which did not have a touch-sensitive interface.) Three months later, on 28th January 2002, Chuang Li submitted an amended application, which was again rejected, in November 2002. In May of 2003 Chuang Li appealed the rejection and submitted another amendment. The appeal was ultimately successful, and the patent was issued on the 9th of October, 2003.

Looking at this chronology, you can see that the patent application was amended after the July 2002 launch of the touch-wheel iPod. Numerous rejections and resubmissions are common in the patent process, but they can be symptomatic of a “submarine patent,” where an inventor (famously Jerome H. Lemelson) files a vague patent and tweaks it over the course of several years to make it apply to some successful product that has appeared in the interim. The most egregious type of patent trolling is when the patent at issue is meritless, but the troll demands a settlement that the defending company determines is cheaper to pay than to go to court over.

The Tsera patent doesn’t cite as prior art Xerox’s US Patent 5596656, filed in 1995 and issued in January 1997. The basic idea of the Xerox patent is to replace a keyboard by forming strokes on a touch-pad, while the basic idea of the Tsera patent is to replace buttons and knobs on a portable electronic device by forming strokes on a touch-pad. The Xerox patent has a system of “unistrokes” on a touch-sensitive surface that can be performed “eyes free” and in which unistroke symbols can “correlate with user invokeable control functions.” The Tsera patent has a “device controlled by a user tracing a command pattern on the touch-sensitive surface with a finger,” “without requiring the user to view the portable electronic device,” with each of the “patterns corresponding to a predefined function of the portable electronic device.”

These descriptions actually apply better to the iPhone and the iPod Touch than they do to the canonical iPod touch-wheel, where the annular touch sensitive surface doesn’t really accommodate free-form strokes.

The Xerox patent was the subject of extensively reported litigation running from 1997 to 2006.

The Xerox patent, which is prior art to the Tsera patent, includes free-form touchpad strokes used as control functions. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that application of this same idea to portable devices would have to be non-obvious or the term “control functions” would have to be narrowly defined in order for the Tsera patent to be valid.

Is Tsera acting as a patent troll? You be the judge.

Posted in Apple, Patents, controversies, iPhone | 1 Comment »

Skype for iPhone

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Well, that last post on the likely deficiencies of VoIP on iPhones may turn out to have been overly pessimistic. It looks as though Hell is beginning to freeze over. Skype is now running on iPhones over the Wi-Fi connection, and for a new release it’s running relatively well. AT&T deserves props for letting it happen – unlike T-Mobile, which isn’t letting it happen and therefore deserves whatever the opposite of props is.

6 hours after it was released Skype became the highest-volume download on Apple’s AppStore. In keeping with Skype’s reputation for ease of use, it downloads and installs with no problems, though as one expects with first revisions it has some bugs.

My brief experience with it has included several crashes – twice when I hung up a call and once when a calendar alarm went off in the middle of a call. Another interesting quirk is that when I called a friend on a PC Skype client from my iPhone, I heard him answer twice, about 3 seconds apart. Presumably a revision will be out soon to fix these problems.

Other quirky behaviour is a by-product of the iPhone architecture rather than bugs, and will have to be fixed with changes to the way the iPhone works. The biggest issue of this kind is that it is relatively hard to receive calls, since the Skype application has to be running in the foreground to receive a call. This is because the iPhone architecture preserves battery life by not allowing programs to run in the background.

Similar system design characteristics mean that when a cellular call comes in a Skype call in progress is instantly bumped off rather than offering the usual call waiting options. I couldn’t get my Bluetooth headset to work with Skype, so either it can’t be done, or the method to do it doesn’t reach Skype’s exemplary ease of use standards.

Now for the good news. It’s free. It’s free to call from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. And the sound quality is very good for a cell phone, even though the codec is only G.729. I expect future revisions to add SILK wideband audio support to deliver sound quality better than anything ever heard on a cell phone before. The chat works beautifully, and it is synchronized with the chat window on your PC, so everything typed by either party appears on both your iPhone and PC screen, with less than a second of lag.

After a half-hour Skype to Skype conversation on the iPhone I looked at my AT&T bill. No voice minutes and no data minutes had been charged, so there appear to be no gotchas in that department. A friend used an iPod Touch to make Skype Wi-Fi calls from an airport hot-spot in Germany – he reports the call quality was fine.

The New York Times review is here

Posted in AT&T, Apple, FMC, Skype, VoIP, Wi-Fi, analyst, dual-mode, iPhone, review, wideband | 1 Comment »

Wi-Fi and the Mobile Internet

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Admob periodically publishes numbers on the mobile Internet and its usage. The numbers are badly skewed because of Admob’s customer mix. For example Indonesia lists as the second largest mobile Internet market in the world. But if you make your own mental adjustments for this, the numbers are informative.

Admob’s latest report highlights Wi-Fi use in the USA.

Of the ad requests fielded by Admob, in August 2008 9% came from Wi-Fi capable devices: dual-mode phones, iPod Touches and Sony PSPs. In November this number doubled to 19%. Since the numbers for August aren’t broken down, it is uncertain which devices drove this growth, but my guess is that it is due to the booming sales of the iPhone.

Of the requests from Wi-Fi capable devices, the proportion that came over Wi-Fi varied radically. For the iPod Touch and the Sony PSP, 100% of the requests were over Wi-Fi. No surprise there. But on the phone side, a very interesting discrepancy between the iPhone (42% of requests by Wi-Fi) and the HTC phones (16% of requests by Wi-Fi). Since each of the phones uses the same browser for cellular data and Wi-Fi connections, it can’t be an ease of use of the Internet issue. Two other possibilities come to mind: the Wi-Fi may be easier to set up on the iPhone than it is on the HTC phones, or the cellular data speed may be worse on the AT&T network, driving the users to Wi-Fi, while users on T-Mobile (where all the HTC phones listed in the report are) get acceptable performance from their cellular data connection.

The Blackberry data casts a similar light on the question. The two Blackberries in the report were the 8820 and the 8320. The 8820 had the same profile as the iPhone – 40% of the requests came by Wi-Fi. The 8320 had even less Wi-Fi use than the HTC phones – only 8% of the requests came by Wi-Fi. These two phones are both on the same carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile), they have the same Wi-Fi chip (from TI), and their specs are similar.

The clue is in their release dates. The 8320 has been out on T-Mobile for a year, but was not yet released on AT&T in November when AdMob collected their numbers. The 8820 was released by AT&T a year ago, but by T-Mobile only 6 months ago. There are obviously a lot of other variables at work – like 3G versus 2G, for example, and pricing structure, but this looks like evidence that the T-Mobile data network has a more acceptable performance than AT&T’s.

Posted in Specifications, Wi-Fi, analyst, cellular, dual-mode, iPhone, phones | No Comments »

A not so perfect Storm

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

The Verizon Storm may be heading for failure in more than one way. A raft of reviewers, led by David Pogue of the New York Times are trashing its usability. This means that even with the marketing might of Verizon behind it it may not fulfill its goal of being a bulwark against the iPhone in the enterprise.

But the Storm was an experiment in another way by Verizon. The other three major American mobile network operators have capitulated to Wi-Fi in smartphones. Against the new conventional wisdom, Verizon decided to launch a new flagship smartphone without Wi-Fi. The Storm looks like a trial balloon to see whether Wi-Fi is optional in modern smartphones. If the Storm is a success, it will demonstrate that it is possible to have credible business smartphones without Wi-Fi. But if it turns out to be a flop because of other factors, it will not be a proof point for Wi-Fi either way.

But Wi-Fi is a closed issue by now for all the network operators, perhaps even including Verizon. Phones have lead times of the order of a year or so, and controversies active back then may now be resolved. Verizon covered its bets by launching three other smartphones around the same time as the Storm, all with Wi-Fi (HTC Touch Pro, Samsung Omnia, Samsung Saga).

Before its launch, AT&T hoped that the iPhone would stimulate use of the cellular data network. It succeeded in this, so far beyond AT&T’s hopes that it revealed a potential problem with the concept of 3G (and 4G) data. The network slows to a crawl if enough subscribers use data intensively in small areas like airports and conferences. Mobile network operators used to fear that if phones had Wi-Fi subscribers would use it instead of the cellular data network, causing a revenue leak. AT&T solved that problem with the iPhone by making a subscription to the data service obligatory. T-Mobile followed suit with the Google phone. So no revenue leak. With the data subscription in hand, Wi-Fi is a good thing for the network operators because it offloads the 3G network. In residences and businesses all the data that goes through Wi-Fi is a reduction in the potential load on the network. In other words, a savings in infrastructure investment, which translates to profit. This may be some of the thinking behind AT&T’s recent acquisition of Wayport. The bandwidth acquired with Wayport offloads the AT&T network relatively cheaply. AT&T’s enthusiasm for Wi-Fi is such that it is selling some new Wi-Fi phones without requiring a data subscription.

The enterprise market is one that mobile network operators have long neglected. It is small relative to the consumer market, and harder to fit into a one-size-fits-all model. Even so, in these times of scraping for revenue in every corner, and with the steady rise of the Blackberry, the network operators are taking a serious look at the enterprise market.

The device manufacturers are way ahead of the network operators on this issue: the iPhone now comes with a lot of enterprise readiness Kool-Aid; Windows Mobile makes manageability representations, as does Nokia with its Eseries handsets. RIM, the current king of the enterprise smartphone vendors also pitches its IT-friendliness.

Wi-Fi in smartphones has benefits and drawbacks for enterprises. One benefit is that you have another smart device on the corporate LAN to enhance productivity. A drawback is that you have another smart device on the corporate LAN ripe for viruses and other security breaches. But that issue is mitigated to some extent if smartphones don’t have Wi-Fi. So it’s arguable that the Storm may be more enterprise-friendly as a result of its lack of Wi-Fi. Again, if the Storm becomes a hit in enterprises that argument will turn out to hold water. If the Storm is a flop for other reasons, we still won’t know, and it will have failed as a trial balloon for Wi-Fi-less enterprise smartphones.

Posted in AT&T, Android, Apple, FMC, Nokia, Samsung, T-Mobile, Wi-Fi, analyst, cellular, controversies, dual-mode, enterprise, iPhone, manageability, market, smartphone | No Comments »

More on voicemail transcription

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

In a previous posting about Jott, I mentioned GotVoice. I spoke with Colin Lamont, the VP of Sales and Marketing at GotVoice the other day. GotVoice is a voicemail-to-email company with some interesting claims. First, it collects voicemail from all your voice mailboxes: cell phone, company, personal, then it transcribes it to text and sends it to you by email and SMS.

GotVoice sells its service directly to end users, and also licenses it to service providers. The largest end-user company that has licensed it to date has about 1,000 employees. The largest service provider licensed to date has 13 million subscribers. Most wireless companies bundle voicemail for free, so GotVoice appeals to them as a way to glean revenues from their voicemail repositories. Many service providers have cobbled-together networks formed by a series of acquisitions. For these, a by-product of the GotVoice service is that it pulls all their voicemail systems from multiple vendors into a unified system.

GotVoice claims that it works with any voicemail service. This is technically challenging. There are about 8 major systems vendors from whom telephone service providers buy voicemail equipment, and each of those providers has multiple iterations of its products. So GotVoice has done extensive work first to integrate with all of these by dial-up emulation of a user, then by direct access through the system APIs for service provider deployments.

A second collection of GotVoice special sauce is in their transcription technology. GotVoice has established an exclusive partnership with an ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) vendor, working together to achieve a remarkable level of accuracy for automated recognition. The basis for this accuracy is twofold. First, it is tailored to voicemail, which tends to have a relatively consistent structure. Second, GotVoice had a non-transcription voice mail service for a few years, and amassed collection of archival voicemails from hundreds of thousands of users with which to train their recognizer. As a result, GotVoice claims 90% recognition accuracy, compared with 60%-65% from rivals.

This high accuracy enables GotVoice to depend less heavily on human transcribers. The obvious benefit of this is that their cost of doing business is lower because they need less workers. A less obvious benefit is that GotVoice claims greater confidentiality than its competitors. The agents who transcribe the parts that the ASR misses are presented only with small fragments of speech, and with a list of guesses from the recognizer. This means that the overall meaning of the message is less likely to be revealed to call center workers.

GotVoice charges $0.25 for each transcribed voicemail, with a minimum of $5.00 per month for the service.

GigaOM reviewed GotVoice in February. The review elicited some informative comments from users of various similar services.

I haven’t tried GotVoice yet, mainly because my current setup works well enough that my motivation to change is weak. I don’t have all that GotVoice offers, but I do have a single voice mailbox with a visual list of its contents.

My personal unified voicemail system is very simple. I only give out my landline number, which is provisioned to forward on busy/no answer to my cell phone. That way I pick it up on my desk when I am in the office and when I am out of the office the call rolls over to my mobile phone. If I don’t answer it there, it goes to voicemail. So all my voicemail is on the mobile.

Since my mobile is an iPhone, I get a nice visual voicemail interface. For each voicemail it shows the Caller ID and the time, though of course no text indicator of the contents. Unfortunately the iPhone visual voice mail has an irritating flaw: there is a long pause (4 or 5 seconds), between pressing the play button and starting to hear the message.

Posted in ASR, iPhone | No Comments »

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Linley Guide to Connectivity Chips for Cellular Handsets
The Internet Traffic Report monitors the flow of data around the world. It then displays a value between zero and 100. Higher values indicate faster and more reliable connections.