It’s official.  GotVoice has circled the ring and claimed the title of Best-in-Breed.  Was it our shiny coat?  Our brilliantly white teeth?  Our ability to resist the temptation to inappropriately sniff the competition?  Maybe.

Our development department contends it was because our new G2 platform uses advanced free-form speech recognition technology to provide unmatched voicemail-to-text accuracy and speed and that our new carrier-grade, high quality transcription engine is built for scalability and interoperates with all major voice & VoIP carriers.   That our unique technology pairing allows seamless access to any existing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and/or voicemail system, as well as voicemail-to-text conversion — without infrastructure upgrades or capital outlays.  Admittedly it’s pretty amazing. 

Still, I chalk up at least part of our victory to the creative use of trimming shears.  Kind of like the creative use of shears by my barber in college.  In fact, his creativity earned me the nickname “Flobie” after the nefarious vacuum haircutting machine of the same.  I know it seemed like a good idea at the time, but looking back on the experience I’d have to say it wasn’t one of my best ideas to choose a barber with an eyepatch. 

Congrats to the GotVoice Dev Team for the successful launch of GotVoice G2, the newest version of the GotVoice convergence communications platform.

You can read the entire press release here, but some highlights of the platform include:

• Even faster Voice-to-Text Transcriptions
• The most accurate transcriptions in the business today
• Seamless access to any existing Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
• Scalable and interoperates with all major voice & VoIP carriers

This is a huge advancement in voice-to-text technology, so congrats to the dev team. This platform release is for the carriers and other service providers, but you should see your personal voicemail experience improve over the next few weeks as the product rolls out across the country.

Our friends over at PC World have assembled a nice list, naming GotVoice as one of 8 top mobile services to keep you connected to your business.

Besides GotVoice, James Martin names the following:

• MobiMate’s WorldMate Live and Orbitz’s Traveler Update
• JiWire Hotspot Finder
• myHours.com
• MyGads.com
• TeleFlip
• WebEx PCNow
• Quicken Online

We’ll be checking out these other services this month, especially when we head to CTIA in Las Vegas in a few weeks.

We’re not talking about hamburgers.  MobileCrunch reports that in 2007, more than 1 Billion Mobile phones were sold to consumers. At GotVoice, more mobile phone sales means more people can receive voicemail as text messages, so these stats are very interesting:

The article quotes:

According to figures from Gartner, sales of mobile phones surpassed 1.15 billion units in 2007. This number is a 16% increase from 2006’s numbers of 999 million units sold. Much of this growth is due to emerging markets like China and India where many people are buying their first handset.

Nokia is still the world’s alpha male of mobile phone manufacturers. It sold 435 million handsets last year. Throughout 2007, Nokia controlled 37.8% of global market share. For the first time, Nokia accounted for 40% of all sales in the fourth quarter.

If you are going to be at TMIA next week, please feel free to contact GotVoice VP of Marketing Colin Lamont. Colin will be speaking on a panel entitled, “Voice to Text” on Thursday.

If you have ideas for partnerships, co-marketing opportunities or just want to talk about Voicemail tools, Colin will be available most of the week.  Shoot him a quick email from here.

As if the city of Phoenix didn’t have enough going on with the Super Bowl last weekend, the town was also busy throwing the biggest party / golf tournament on the PGA Tour - the FBR Open.  Over 4 days more than 500,000 went through the gates.

Now technically, you cannot bring phones into the event.  If you are caught talking on your phone, you can have the device confiscated - or worse.  Plus, since everyone had to have the ringers turned off, it made it nearly impossible to get incoming calls.  And with 170,000 people at the event Saturday, getting separated from your friends created real logistical nightmares.

So the GotVoice Voicemail to Text functionality was a real lifesaver.  Rather than having to listen to a long line of voicemails from people trying to find us, we could just look down and see the message.   Very useful.  And no cell phones were confiscated in the process.

We’ve created an avatar for the school official’s wife. We don’t know the whole story, but we really don’t think it’s cool when adults rip into students. Plus, this popular clip, complete with CNN coverage of the YouTube post, serves as a great GotVoice Avatar example. Here it is with full transcription:

Here’s the recap of the story of Cindy Tistadt vs Dave Kori that led to that clip, according to DCist.com

If you caught the morning network news shows or read this Washington Post storydetailing the whole affair, then you may already know the story of Devraj “Dave” S. Kori, a senior at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Fairfax County, who called the school system’s administrator at home last week to give him a hard time about not declaring a snow day. Kori found a number for Dean Tistadt, chief operating officer for the county system, listed in the phone book, and decided to call to ask why he had not closed the schools after about three inches of snow fell near Burke, Va. What he got in return was an angry voicemail, posted to YouTube, from Tistadt’s wife.

Now, no matter whether you think the kid or the wife is right, here are some interesting points.

1. If Mr. Kori had GotVoice, he would have been able to just forward the file as an MP3, rather than make his own recording.
2. If Mrs. Tistadt had GotVoice, she would have an MP3 recording of Mr. Kori’s call to play as a rebuttal.

To show our neutrality, we are offering both Mrs. Tistadt and Mr. Kori free GotVoice subscriptions. Please email us and we’ll activate your accounts right away.

More Links on this:

• The Facebook Page
• YouTube Page
• Washington Post
• USA Today

One of the fun things about talking avatars is the ability to export them from your GotVoice Message Center as MP4 files, then upload them to other social media sites such as Facebook. It’s like taking your voicemail on the road.

Here’s an example of a birthday message to one of our GotVoice Team Members from his little nephews. We have the video hosted in our GotVoice Facebook Group. Try it yourself on your own FB page.

GotVoice users should notice something new in your account center today. We’re very excited about adding to your Voicemail experience, as our lip-synched Avatars read your voicemail to you. Upload the funniest Talking Avatars to YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, or forward them to friends by email. We like to call it “Putting the Character Back Into Voicemail.”

• Lip-Synched Avatars read back your voicemail
• 50+ Avatars to assign to each caller
• Choose from popular political figures or just plain goofy characters.

To activate your avatars, simply go into the GotVoice Message Center and play one of your messages. Look for the words “Enable Avatars” in the middle of the Message Center and choose the one you like best from the many options - bears, monsters, politicians, robots and more. You can change anytime.

And thanks to our friends at Voki for partnering up with us on this. The avatars include lip-syncing technology powered by the Voki speaking avatar platform, which was developed by Oddcast, Inc., the leader in speaking avatar technology.

Have fun with them and make sure to tell us what you think.

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Here’s a link to the official press release about Talking Avatars. More info to come soon.

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