Here’s an interesting Voice to Text story from CES, where the first Closed-Captioned HD Radio for the Deaf was launched By NPR, Harris and Towson University.

Using capabilities that are part technology and part human typists, NPR broadcasts are transcribed in real time, with the text displayed on special receivers onscreen. Numerous receiver manufacturers are expected to join the initiative.

Very neat stuff - another cool application of Voice to Text technology that brings content to the hearing impaired.

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MobileCrunch wrote a few days ago that Verizon expected customers to send over 300 million text, picture and video messages on New Year’s Eve between the hours of 12 p.m. and 4a.m. ET New Year’s Day.

Hopefully, people had a few minutes to sent some voicemails as well. And with a combination of a late night, general merriment and plenty bottles of champagne, we bet you all have a few good ones to hold onto for a long time. Whether they were declarations of love, general craziness or ramblings that simply didn’t make sense, use your GotVoice to down them to your MP3 player and build a little playlist of your favorite ones. They’ll be great to listen to later in the year.

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Sometimes we don’t talk about ourselves here at the GotVoice blog, and instead focus on stuff we like.  We’ve been recently playing with Faves, which allows you to basically set up links to your favorite web sites and share them with your friends.

It’s a neat way to share things you like, and here’s an example of some “favers” talking about GotVoice.  Let us know what you think of Faves.

Another letter in:

Dear folks at Got Voice,

Quick story for you. My Aunt called and left me a message a few weeks ago. She said she wanted some book from Pope John Paul II for Christmas. I mentally noted it. “Pope John Paul. Book. Got it.”

Then about a week later I went to Amazon and looked for books by Pope John Paul II. Did you know he wrote a ton of them? I didn’t. Uh-oh. Which one did she want? It’s not like I could go and call her back.

Then I remembered that the voicemail was probably archived in my Google mail A couple of quick searches later, text of my aunt’s voicemail was on my screen, and I was one Copy and Paste from buying the present. Thanks for helping me out this year. I’m telling everyone I know this story.

- Liz B, Sacramento, CA

Thanks Liz. If you have your own story, email us.

The GotVoice Affiliate Program, managed through Commission Junction, continues to be one of the top performing ways for bloggers and retailers to sell products involving mobile technologies. And our 7 day EPC’s are up with some of the major cell phone carriers in the U.S.

With 2008 being the “Year of the Mobile Phone,” we expect these numbers to grow across the board. And we want to use this area as a forum to get feedback from our best partners - you - and gather suggestions on how we can help bolster your sales efforts.

Voice to Text is poised to explode next year, so tell us what you need to maximize the amount of money you are making from your web site. You can email us or send us comments here in the blog.

Rich Tehrani does a nice job of covering the Visual Voicemail space this week over at TMC.net. His review is fair across all companies in the space, but his main point is extremely important (though buried at the bottom.)

“Regardless of which service you choose, voicemail to text/visual voicemail is a fantastic productivity booster. I would imagine that students and smartphone users should also want to try the technology out for themselves. It is one of those really fantastic productivity enablers you just don’t expect to be so useful. Once you try one of these services you will wonder how you ever lived without them.”

It must be December, because everyone is either recapping what happened in 2007 or predicting what will happen in 2008. And of course, the Old Grey Lady will be leading the way.

David Pogue of the New York Times asks if 2008 is the Year of the Cell Phone. He argues that 2007 saw the marriage of cell phone to Internet (though he accidentally forgot to mention GotVoice). Definitely a worthwile read.

This may be the funniest comment we’ve gotten in a while…

Dear GotVoice - Thank you, thank you thank you.  My landlord is a psychopath.  Not crazy, not nutty, not eclectic.  But a certified loony bird.  Furthermore, she refuses to use email.  So when she calls to tell me something one day, invariably it means the opposite in the future and I previously HAD no way to deal with this.  But now, thanks to you guys, I just let her leave wandering, quixotic messages for me on my voicemail.  Then when she reverses field, I can print out the text transcription of what she said and replay the message from my archive. Now, she’s stopped calling me altogether and life couldn’t be more grand.  Thank you for helping purge some crazy from my life.”

We had a nice email come in the other day. It turns out this person loves GotVoice so much, they want to give it as a Christmas present to their husband who also loves cool products and technology. She asked if there was a way to do this? The answer is yes, though at this point it’s easier to give it to spouses and family members than friends and colleagues.

If you know the person’s email address, phone number, pin code and what carrier they use, then this is easy. The first page of the sign up form will ask for these. Make sure you use your email address (but not the same email address use have for your account). On the next page of the order form, you can insert your own credit card information.

Now, if you don’t know their pin code, just fill in a fake one. They won’t be able to use GotVoice, but they’ll be signed up and will just need to input their real one to activate it. Also, when you give them the gift, they can then change the email address and password to their own.

How do I wrap it?

Well, that will take a little more imagination. You could print out the web site, fold it up and put it in a card. Or if we catch any of our graphic designers threatening to take a coffee break, we’ll sit them back in the chair and make a special gift card for you to print out.

What about my Credit Card?

Your credit card will be attached to their account, so don’t put your Amex Black on there. We’re working on some new billing options, but it’s unclear if we’ll be able to “hide” credit card info from an account in the immediate future. Of course, you can also just sign them up, give them the cash and then watch them put their own card in there. But in the case of gifts for husbands, wives, parents and kids, you are probably all on the same card anyway.

Business Wire brings us a release from the Mobile Marketing Association, featuring new data from their third-annual Mobile Attitude and Usage Study.

Particularly relevant to the world of Voice to Text and Visual Voicemail, is that “54 percent of 13-34 year olds use SMS for social networking, while 44 percent of 13-34 year olds said they use text messaging for flirting or dating…”

Also noted in the survey results: “Teens and young adults use text messaging more than any other demographic. People ages 13-24 send and receive the most – more than 50 messages per week – while half of all survey respondents use text messaging at least once a week.”

And one last thing we found interesting - “Sweepstakes and voting campaigns are the most widely used types of mobile marketing. The second most common type is receiving alerts about products, services, accounts.“

All of this data points to a single trend - More people are using SMS more often, for more types of services. Receiving SMS Text versions of Voicemail is already rapidly rising, and all signs point toward it continuing its ascent.

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