For voicemail, that term is getting thrown around for everything from purely automated machine “guesses” (often getting it completely wrong) to services where humans listen to, type, and carefully edit each voicemail, where it’s almost perfect. (And even things in between where messages go through machines, and if the machine isn’t confident it got it right, it goes to people. That’s the hardest to do well, since confidence doesn’t necessarily correlate really well with accuracy).

The whole goal with really accurate transcriptions is that you know exactly what the caller said, reliably, without having to play the voicemail, which is a big time-savings, and is important if your voicemail matters to you. If it doesn’t, or you’re just trying to decide whether or not to play it, then “gist-based” approaches can be low cost and work fine.

We’re not a disinterested party – at youmail.com, as an add-on to our free mobile voicemail service, we provide something on the human-edited side, and we charge $6.99/month for up to 50 voicemails/month – where most people get between 25 and 50 messages/month (1-2/day). And we get somewhere between 95-97% of the words right. But having humans involved isn’t cheap.

From reading the terms of service at AT&T, it seems that they use human-edited as well to try to provide accuracy, and they limit messages to something like 480 characters (60-80 words), or somewhere between 30-40 seconds. But they allow more messages (it appears to be unlimited, though they reserve the right to refuse service to high volume users under certain circumstances.) Disclaimer: we’re not AT&T, and may be reading the legalese incorrectly. But that’s why they’re not free – and in fact, they probably lose a lot of money on the higher volume users.

–Alex
CEO, YouMail

Makes me wonder: who would want to pay $10 a month for a service that is inferior to a free service? But then again, makes me wonder why I stay with AT&T instead of switching to the superior Verizon network.