Lest anyone suspect me of being a luddite, I’m not - I love technology. But this is another example of how technology sometimes just isn’t ready for prime time yet. Vonage (which provides my home office phone service) has a visual voicemail service that they’re desperate for me to sign up for, and so they’ve given me a 10-message free trial. Visual voicemail in this case means they have a piece of software from SimulScribe which translates the message from speech to text. I got one message this way yesterday, which was largely fine (except for the name of the VoiceCon conference, which got translated as boys foam - it doesn’t seem to do well with proper names). Anyway, today I got another message through the miracle of speech to text and it was as follows (any personally identifying information removed):

“Hi, yeah [should have been my name, Jan, which is pronounced closer to the American yawn than yeah]. This is [name of PR person, correctly transcribed] calling [word "from" omitted] [name of PR company, correctly transcribed]. I just wanted to follow-up with you I see that your [SpinVox is apparently not using any kind of grammar checker] going to CTIA. I wanted to know if you were interested in meeting with (Pittny Boost muffin?) [my favorite mistake - this should have been Pitney Bowes Mapinfo] so dayview [should have been they do] locations, intelligence, solution [location intelligence solutions] for the communications industry. I did send a an e-mail last week and I just wanted to follow-up on that to see if you were interested in meeting with (Porshe Cherry?[Chris Cherry, from what I can tell - this was in fairness pretty garbled on the audio]) from (Pittny Boost muffin?) so my phone number is 555-555-5555 it’s said CTIA 2008 (Pittny Boost muffin?) so in subject (fine?) [it said CTIA 2008 Pitney Bowes Mapinfo in the subject line] and I look forward to speaking with you. Thanks. Bye. “

Cleverly, the software does leave out any ums, ahs, and ers, of which there were a fair few in this message, and it flags the things it’s not sure about with parentheses and a question mark. Now, even with all these crazy screw-ups, it’s still comprehensible (although I might have had to listen to figure out the name of the company if the PR person hadn’t indeed previously sent me an email). I’m tempted to subscribe to the service just to add some more fun to my day - perhaps they do this on purpose for just that reason?

Just did a Google News search for “Huckabee” to see if I could find the transcript from his concession speech last night, and Google News came up with this:

So, it seems once you drop out of the presidential race you also drop off Google News’s search results. I wonder if this is a funny quirk resulting from some tweaking in Google’s News database (does he have to somehow be shifted from the bucket marked “current candidates” to “past candidates” or something?). Presumably they’ll fix this soon…

David Pogue has a nice (or awful, depending on your perspective) example from one of his readers of woeful tech support, delivered via one of those “live chat” applications which are springing up all over the place. When combined with the remote delivery of said tech support (in this case, the tech support guy’s name was purportedly “Sean” but who knows whether he was sitting in New York or New Delhi) this makes for some bad results. I’ve certainly had several of these experiences myself, which can mix the worst of IM/SMS jargon and generally bad English.

This is another of those examples where the internally-facing (or at least shareholder-facing) prerogative to save money on customer support is in conflict with the external-(customer)-facing prerogative of customer satisfaction. Live chat can be a boon - since it’s live you rarely have to wait, in comparison with call centres. But it can also make for a much worse experience once you actually get going. And more than once I’ve been told that I need to chat or even talk with a different department once I’m halfway through the live chat I thought would get me what I needed. More thought needed from all the companies involved in this stuff.

Of late, I’ve just been struck by how frequently new software development work is being done for the iPhone - whether it’s LinkedIn’s new mobile interface, Gmail’s latest mobile updates or Remember The Milk’s mobile features. All this is being done for a device with 2% or less of smartphone market share, and which is the only device with its OS. Compare that with other mobile operating systems like Windows Mobile, Symbian, RIM’s OS and even Palm and they all dwarf iPhone’s share.

Now, if I were a developer, I imagine I might quite enjoy the challenge of developing for such an attractive and highly-functional platform. But in doing all this, these developers are tying up finite resources in developing a platform which will serve only a small fraction of the userbase of their web services / sites. And although not all these companies’ mobile development resources are going into iPhone they often seem to launch for that platform first, and roll out the newest and best features there first too. Admittedly, this is partly because the iPhone is a much more capable platform than its competitors, but even so these companies are alienating the 95% plus of their users who are not iPhone owners but do want to use their mobile devices to access their services.

Now, I’m speaking here mainly as a non-iPhone-using mobile user. I resent some of this at a personal level, but that’s neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things. The larger implication is that those other mobile platforms need to take notice of this trend and do something about it. Apple hasn’t released the SDK for the iPhone yet (though that’s imminent) and it has a tiny market share, but even so developers are paying attention and prioritizing iPhone development. This should tell those responsible for other operating systems and device platforms that they have some serious catching up to do in order to attract that kind of energy and attention. Just think what will happen when the iPhone actually has significant market share…