Neon prescription... or rather, New transcription for Google Voice (2015)

You may have been there before...open your voicemail transcriptions in Google Voice to find that at times they aren’t completely intelligible. Or, they are humorously intelligible. Either way, they might not have been the message the caller meant to leave you.

So, we asked users if they would kindly share some of their voicemails for research and system improvements. Thanks to those who participated, we are happy to announce an improved voicemail system in Google Voice and Project Fi that delivers more accurate transcriptions. Using a (deep breath) long short-term memory deep recurrent neural network (whew!), we cut our transcription errors by 49%.

To start receiving improved voicemail transcriptions, you don't need to do a thing -- just continue to use Google Voice as you have been. For those not using Google Voice but want to give it a try, sign up for a Google Voice (or Google Voice Lite) account here, it’s quick and easy to get started.

Many thanks to the Google Voice users who shared their voicemails, they really helped us make the product better. While this is a big improvement, it is just the beginning and with your input, we will continue improving voicemail transcriptions over time. We hope you enjoy it and look forward to hearing what you link—er, think!