Alert Blog Reviews

Google Voice ’s transcribe feature pretty much sucks. How inaccurate is it? Well, see for yourself. Here’s a portion of a voicemail left for me recently: Play Google Voicemail Now, here’s the transcription according to Google Voice: “.. I’m trying to a 98 so that cool voice can proper with trans with transcribe this message…” I’m not quite sure what’s more embarrassing for Google Voice: a) It couldn’t transcribe “enunciate” or, b) It didn’t even recognize “Google Voice”!!! Anyway, the feature is still useful to have–especially when you’re busy and not sure if you should listen to the voicemail or not. And, to be fair, Google does recognize that its automated transcription service needs a lot of work. In fact, it’s asking for your help . You can now “donate” your voicemail for scientific testing: The messages you donate may be listened to, manually transcribed by us and/or used to gauge transcription improvements over time, but they will never be made public or used for any other purpose than improving the transcription quality. I’m guessing Tiger Woods won’t be donating any voicemails in the near future. Will you give Google your voicemails? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Are Those Google Voices Inside Your Head Making Any Sense?

My favorite Google Voice feature is the ability to have all voicemails transcribed and emailed to me. I can then read the text–transcribed with about 80% accuracy–or listen to the actual audio. It saves a lot of time and comes in handy when I’m on the road. That cool feature is now available on my cell phone, thanks to a new Google Voice feature . In fact, if you don’t have a Google Voice number yet, you can go ahead and use your existing mobile phone number–which gives you the benefits of keeping your existing number and the use of Google Voice’s features. Except, you don’t get all of the great features, as the chart below explains : Perhaps the better option–at least for me–is to keep my existing Google Voice number and simply assign Google Voice to grab all of my mobile phone’s voicemails. That way, I get to keep ALL of the cool features in Google Voice, while enjoying the advanced voicemail features for my cell. If that sounds like a winner to you too, simply head to your Google Voice "Settings" and look for the option below your "Phones" tab. You don’t appear to have much to lose by trying it, as it appears the choice is reversible! Sweet!

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Google Voice Goes Mobile

When the Google Analytics team shared today’s new features with me, they wanted to walk me through all of the minor updates–before they revealed the big news. I’m not going to do that to you! You’re getting algorithmically driven, artificially intelligent, email alerts! Andy, in English, please! If Google Analytics detects a change in the data patterns of your site’s metrics it will send you an email alert to let you know . So, for example, let’s say your site gets to the homepage of Digg–and you were honestly unaware of it (yeah, right)–Google Analytics would send you an email alert to let you know “hey, you’re getting WAY more traffic from Digg than you normally get, hoss. You may want to come and investigate it.” OK, maybe not those exact words, but you get the idea. Here’s a screenshot of the new dashboard: Even better, you can set up your own custom alerts. So if you want to know when your conversion rate from visitors from California drops below 2%, you can set that up! Cool huh? Now the not so cool. The data is not yet “real time” but Amy Chang, Group Product Manager for Google Analytics, tells us to “stay tuned” on that. Also not so cool, Google Analytics is not smart enough to realize that you’ve set up a custom alert–so if your custom alert is similar to what Google has intelligently identified, you may end up getting two alerts. Lastly, no SMS alerts–at least “not yet.” Though with Google Voice rolling out to more folks, I suspect SMS alerts are not too far behind. OK, so what other cool eye-candy is the Google Analytics fairy handing out today? Here’s a quick summary: More custom goals! You can now have up to 20 goals per profile–up from the previous limit of 4. Two new goal types: Time on Site and Pages per Visit . Perfect for those that wish to measure engagement and branding success rates! Mobile access measurement. Add a new server side snippet to your mobile website and Google Analytics will make all your mobile metric dreams come true! Lots more tweaks. Personally, I’m just plain giddy to get the analytics alerts. Now I don’t have to worry about checking in on my sites to see if there’s “anything out of the ordinary” going on. Google will let me know if something’s up. Now, if we could just get to real-time alerts, I can sleep at night knowing that, if Marketing Pilgrim is nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Google Analytics will alert me to the surge in traffic.

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First Look: Google Analytics Adds Intelligent Email Alerts & More!