GotVoice Adds Talking Bears and Speech-To-Text Transcription

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GotVoice is a great voicemail utility that has so far focused on delivering visual voicemail (phone/web), custom voicemail greetings, and broadcasting voice messages (like Pinger). Through some clever coding, GotVoice links directly into your voicemail to pull messages into the system and send messages back out through it. However, the product has been lacking one of the killer voicemail features of their competitors, speech-to-text.

gotvoicescreen.pngToday they’re differentiating themselves from GrandCentral and closing the gap with their other competitors by adding speech-to-text transcription. And adding avatars to boot.

Their new avatar system will let you add some personality to your voicemail playback using SitePal’s avatars. It’s sure to come in handy if for some reason you enjoy getting your messages delivered by a bear.

Their speech-to-text offering allows you to transcribe voicemails to text for delivery via email or SMS. You can transcribe all your messages, or filter by contact. Transcription is available on their $9.99/month premium accounts including 40 messages a month with additional charges for each message thereafter, although they have a 14 free trial.

Spinvox and CallWave also offer call transcription. Spinvox is pricey in the U.S. if you take into account exchange rates, costing £9.99/month for 50 messages. CallWave is currently a good deal, transcribing calls for free during their open beta.

Scouta Releases Windows Client that Recommends Media Using iTunes

Scouta releases today a Windows client for generating video and audio recommendations based on the podcasts and videocasts in a user’s iTunes collection. This release comes just over a month after the company released a Mac version to do pretty much the same thing.

To use the client, all you have to do is install and configure it with your Scouta user account and set the frequency at which you want it to sync with your iTunes collection. Be sure to have some podcasts in iTunes before trying this out; otherwise it’s pretty pointless (it won’t recommend content based on your music collection alone).

The client will also only create recommendations using the podcasts and videocasts you’ve actually listened to or watched. Once recommendations are generated, users can tweak them by manually rating content in the Scouta web interface.

If you only casually consume podcasts, Scouta may be overkill and not worth the time to set up (even though the process is pretty dead simple). Personally, I discover enough online content through emails from friends and by simply browsing sites like YouTube and the iTunes catalog. But, if you love discovering new content online, this client could come in very handy.

MOG, iLike, and Last.fm also provide content recommendation systems that integrate with iTunes, except they focus on music and not general media.

The screenshot below provides a view of the Scouta recommendation interface.

Wikia Gaming Launches With 250,000 Articles

I love Wikia - CEO Gil Penchina, a former eBay executive, says he works harder than anyone in Silicon Valley at building his startup. I routinely point out to him that his startup doesn’t actually do anything - their wiki software is based on the open source MediaWiki project, Google, Looksmart and FM Publishing handle all the revenue via ad sales, and their users create every drop of content on the site. All he has to do is make sure the lights stay on (to be fair, Wikia has made substantial contributions to MediaWiki).

Anyway, back to the news: Wikia is launching Wikia Gaming tonight, a collection of video game focused wikis. The sites contain over 250,000 articles on games already, on all major platforms. The World of Warcraft site is the largest single wiki, with 43,000 articles.

Wikia, which has raised $14 million from Bessemer and Amazon, claims a quarter billion monthly page views. 800,000 articles on 3,000 topics have been created and edited by over 200,000 registered users in 70 languages.

Multi-Language Image Search Tool Released By University

PanImages is a new search project coming out of the University of Washington that allows users to search for images in their native language and receive far more results than with traditional search.

Emerging search engines such as Like.com allow searches via image queries, but are far from becoming mainstream. Most image search today is conducted by an analysis of the metadata around the image. So an image search on Google for “flower” returns results that have the tag “flower” in the photo metadata - 11.4 million results. But if you only speak Spanish, a search for “flores” returns just 2.2 million results.

Search engines are slowly beginning to allow cross-language queries to return more results to people who speak less popular languages. Google’s effort launched earlier this year, handles just a dozen major languages and does not address image search.

PanImages, by contrast, supports over 300 languages. Users simply type in the query and the language they are speaking and see a result set that includes translations. Clicking on a result returns Google Image and Flickr search results for that term.

The data itself is still somewhat thin, and users are asked to add translations when the site doesn’t already know what you mean. But the early results are useful, particularly if you speak a fairly obscure language. An images search for the Zulu word for refrigerator returns just two results. A similar search on PanImages returns 472,000 results.

Satisfaction Gets $1.3 Million To Crowdsource Your Help Desk

Customers are a hidden source of product specialists that corporations have been slow to tap. They usually become very knowledgeable about products they love and can often solve problems an understaffed support department doesn’t have the resources or will to solve (e.g. how to unlock an iPhone). It’s no wonder crowdsourcing your customers has become a popular and lucrative business - just see our recent coverage of PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice).

satisfactionscreen.gifSatisfaction Unlimited is another one of the companies tapping this knowledge base by helping young companies crowdsource their support amongst their customers. They’re doing it through a network of corporate discussion boards that let customers ask questions, propose ideas, submit problems, or just chat. Satisfaction is currently powering online support for a couple notable properties (Twitter, Pownce, Slideshare) and is now opening up a public beta to even more companies. They’ve also just raised a $1.3 million round from First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Jeff Clavier, Adaptive Path, Mike Brown, and Jason Schultz.

Satisfaction’s network consists of AJAXy bulletin boards for over 200 companies. Not all of them are “owned” by the companies they represent, but rather spots for consumers to meet each other and mull over their latest issues. The open beta will let companies come in and claim these boards so they can moderate the forum and connect with their customers.

Having a network of these help boards provides an advantage to setting up your own board since the network comes with an existing user base. Tangler’s forums system also has this advantage.

The boards themselves are very similar to Jive’s entry-level product, their enterprise knowledge base. Users can create profiles and make posts to the board. Corporate mods can surf the board to moderate and answer questions. You can also search for and follow different conversation threads by email and RSS as they unfold. While Jive offers a significant number of extra upgrades to their system, Satisfaction fits the bill for smaller businesses.

MySpace Getting A Little Less Chaotic?

Interesting blog post by MySpace co-founder and president Tom Anderson this morning. He’s proposing a new default layout for MySpace pages that has significantly better organization of user information, and moves from a two column to three column approach.

So we’ve been working on a new home page design here. Thinking of launching this in a few weeks, but I wanted to see what people thought about. Take a look and tell me what you think

The page certainly has more of a Facebook look and feel than the existing default theme, with clearly delineated content areas and modules, and a new horizontal navigation bar across the top.

Unlike Facebook, MySpace allows users to customize the CSS of their profiles. If you really don’t want to leave MySpace but love the clean lines of Facebook, there are templates to customize MySpace to look just like Facebook.

Salesforce Enters Custom Application Market With Force.com

Salesforce will enter the custom software market next week with the launch of Force (site will go live Monday morning), a new platform that will allow developers to create database driven applications and deploy them as services. So if Salesforce doesn’t offer what you are looking for, and no one has built it for you on Salesforce’s AppExchange, you can simply build it yourself using the Apex framework.

At its core Force competes as a development platform with .NET, Java, etc. But there are also a slew of startups that have focused on allowing people to easily create and deploy database driven applications - DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. All will take a hit from Force. In fact, this may be sort of game ending for them. Salesforce has its eyes on much bigger fish than those startups.

Any internal process or function that requires custom software may be a candidate for Force. Disney, which has been testing the platform, is using it to manage character (Mickey Mouse, etc.) appearances. EA has built a recruiting application. Bronx School is using Force to manage attendance, performance, etc. Salesforce says they can actually manage the entire school on Force.

Salesforce is also announcing VisualSource, a set of tools that allow developers to build applications for multiple devices (tablets, iphone, etc.) and add HTML, AJAX and Flex to Force applications (making for much nicer looking and more user friendly applications). See the screen shot below for an example user interface.

Pricing is a flat $25/month/user.

Salesforce has always said its about software as a service. Next week, they say they’re deploying the platform as a service with Force. I imagine they’ll find a receptive customer base.

Google Presently Powerpoint Clone Could Be Days Away

Google’s long awaited Powerpoint clone could be days away from launching, according to a report at The Inquirer.

The service is said to be called “Presently” and is based in part on code from Zenter and Tonic Systems, two companies Google acquired earlier this year.

Presentations have long been the missing link in Google’s attempts to provide a full office suite that challenges market leader Microsoft Office. The Powerpoint clone was first rumored in February then confirmed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in April. More recently Google integrated Powerpoint viewing functionality into Gmail.

If a launch of Presently is coming shortly, the timing is perfect for Google, given that they have this week announced a deal with global consulting firm Capgemini to distribute their office package.

Will Europe’s Free Mobile Service Blyk Finally Launch?

From TechCrunchUK: Europe’s Blyk, the much anticipated and much delayed advertising supported mobile service, may be gearing up for launch very soon. They’ve scheduled a press conference for September 24. The service has also recently said they are “on track for launch.”

The service will be free for users and targeted to 16-24 year olds. Presumably that age group will be more receptive to receiving an endless stream of advertising in exchange for free mobile minutes and texting.

Mosh Mobile is theoretically a U.S. equivalent to the service, but none of the carriers I’ve spoken to have ever heard of them, and they don’t appear to be funded. My guess is it’s more of a pipe dream than anything.

Look for iPhone UK news next week as well