Illustration from a 1940’s Bell Labs project investigating human speech synthesis and recognition

I recently signed up for SimulScribe, a new service which replaces your existing voicemail system with one that:

1. Transcribes the voice message into text (using a speech-to-text (STT) engine)…
2. wraps the voicemail message into a WAV file…
3. and then emails the raw text and the WAV file (as an attachment) to your email address.

Setting up SimulScribe couldn’t be easier: The free trial doesn’t even require a credit card to start using right away, and they provide you with explicit and shockingly simple instructions for configuring your voicemail for your particular carrier. You can be set up with the SimulScribe service in literally under 3 minutes.

After setting it up (and this may come has a shock to those of you who still think STT is not ready for prime time), the system has performed almost flawlessly.

Below I’ll present some example transcriptions, followed by some ideas on how this technology might be extended in the future. MORE…

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Not me.

I’ve had enough of the term “surfing” when talking about “what we do when we use the web”. It was a terrible metaphor when it was first invented, and it’s only gotten worse. This morning on the radio I heard a journalist describe a terrorist using a computer to view terror videos with the word “surfing”.

Surfing implies a kind of un-seriousness to using the web, as if it was just playing around. But in my experience at least half of my web usage is pretty serious, not goofing off at all. Like many people over the age of 18, I use my computer for work-related activities like research, productivity. It’s hardly surfing when I am posting a wireframe deck to my company extranet. It’s not surfing when I am checking my web-based email, researching a content management system, or searching via Google. It’s not even surfing when I’m blogging, as I am doing right now.

Surfing also implies moving around from place to place quickly, but much of my web usage consists of spending a long time on a single page (reading or entering information), or interacting with web-based applications.

What would be a suitable replacement for the term? “Browsing” doesn’t cut it — browsing implies a particular kind of action, such as using a directory to find a book on amazon.com. “Using”?

Do we even need a cute jargony term for this? Can’t we just use the specific term for what we’re actually doing with the web browser? You know, reading, writing, researching, reporting, shopping, viewing, playing. But please, no more surfing.

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On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage.

Surprisingly, there was a part of me that found it a little tiresome, and I thought to myself “Why don’t these guys just talk like normal people and tell us about the election results, instead of all this rehearsed repartee?”. They were acting out scripted set-peices and skits, or riffing on the results by digging into a selection of pre-planned gags and jokes.

Of course, this is Comedy Central, so the scripted quality of the “reportage” is to be expected. Still, despite our deep appreciation for CC’s two “anchors”, we grew impatient and craved the hard news coverage that only a real network can offer. So we resumed by surfing on over to Oppositeland: Fox News.

I immediately noticed that the narrative and theatrical quality and structure of Fox’s coverage was really no different from Comedy Central’s. Each pundit was talking to the other pundits as if the other person didn’t already know what they were going to say, and yet it was clear that everyone knew exactly what everyone else was going to say. Their conversations were fake in every way — not quite scripted, exactly, but so incredibly contrived as to be basically a kind of vaudeville act. MORE…

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Spammers are always coming up with new ideas for how to get by spam filters and new ways to fool people into thinking their messages require immediate reading. And these new ideas seem to come in waves, like fashion or style trends. For example, last week (and all in one day) I received about 50 spam emails (a full 20% of the spam I get daily) in the following vein:

Serious letter. You require to read.
Essential letter. You require to read.
Momentous letter. You must to read.
Grand message. You should to read.
Very important letter. You require to read.

And now, over the last 24 hours I’ve received the following spam subjects:

fw: Please do not come to work today
RE: No work tomorrow; Office closed
Fwd: Hey our boss got fired?
Fw: Hey are they starting layoffs yet?
fwd: Offices have been closed permanently

I can’t tell if these are attempting to exploit the recipients’ fear (of losing their jobs) or their laziness (by giving them hope that they can get a day off). But it makes me wonder: Is the public’s faith in the economy and/or their employers so bad that this type of spam is believable?

Has there been any formal marketing or demographic research into the typical “Spam Consumer/Victim”? I’d love to see that stuff — I’ll bet it’s extremely harsh reading.

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Here’s some news for web designers, interaction designers, graphic designers, information designers, user experience designers, and whatever else you might think of yourself as: New York Magazine defines “design” as “interior design”. And of course the fashion world uses the word “design” to mean “fashion design”.

I’d guess that if you asked a hundred people what a designer does, the most people would describe either a fashion designer or an interior designer.

There is no holistic all-encompassing capital-letter Design out there. Get over it.

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New York design firm Giampietro+Smith hits a little information architecture home run with their design for the magazine the revealer, a very interesting web site about media and religion. The problem of how to structure the presentation of breaking news, current-ish articles, and “evergreen” always-interesting material is something information architects face all the time but never seem to get right.

Using only three simple (and neatly alliterative) words, G+S nailed it:

When Behavior was working with the AIGA on the redesign of their Design Forum a few years ago, we at one point pictured an almost identical structure to the revealer’s, with three columns of content that each had a different “pace”. I imagined the three columns sliding vertically at three different speeds, like Stewart Brand (pictured here at the 2003 IA Summit in an awesome photo by Mike Lee) describing his Clock of the Long Now, in which different types of knowledge and understanding move and evolve at different speeds. We didn’t end up using that design concept, and I wonder if it wasn’t in part because we never quite envisioned it with just the right words for the three columns.

It’s great to see plain old fashioned English used to make information architecture work elegantly. All too often a seemingly-great IA or user interface design strategy falls to peices when you finally get down to nomenclature. Which is why I think it is essential for information architects to be excellent writers with large and strong vocabularies — if you can’t think of a way to take a 15-word button description and reduce it to three, if you can’t think of the one word that succintly describes the twenty types of content in a single section of your site, then you’re missing a critical tool from your UXD utility belt.

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I generally consider myself a capable writer, at least in the technical sense. In particular, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to punctuate properly in written English.

But there are some areas where the language’s “standards” are in continual dispute, some areas where I think the standards are just plain logically wrong, and some where a few minor technical modifications to the rules might be helpful.

In fact, those of us who work in the computer industry might be able to exert some subtle positive influence on English grammar to make it clearer and more logical. You see, I suspect that many people who program computers have a unique grasp of grammatical logic. Not just HTML/CSS developers who are intimately familiar with structuring text in semantically-logical ways, but computer programmers of all types who work with logical structures whose meaning must be airtight.

[Note that I’m not saying that we need to “clean up” English a la some kind of Orwellian newspeak. I’m just offering some minor shifts of thinking to reflect our current technological competencies.] MORE…

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He has a web site, but he’s not a blogger.

It may sound obvious to point that out, but I keep reading news stories and commentaries that discuss, for example, how “blogging” is making traditional media obsolete or something… when in fact they really mean to say “the web” is revolutionizing media and communications.

Next time you write (or read) something about blogs, try mentally replacing the word “blog” with “web site” and see if it changes the meaning of the idea.

Are you talking about a regularly-updated, personality-based web site with certain specific features like comments, rss feeds, blogrolls? Does the site or sites in question even call themselves blogs? Are you even talking about web sites at all, or are you talking about instant messaging and file sharing and other non-web technologies? If not, then you should probably just use the word “web site” (or “message board” or “social network” or “news aggregator” or even just “the internet”, whatever the most appropriate term might be).

These are not blogs, but they are often lumped together by sloppy commentators as part of the “blogging phenomenon”:

• Google
• Wikipedia
• del.icio.us
• Flickr
• The Drudge Report
• Newsvine
• myspace
• Technorati

Sure some of these sites have blogs, but they are not blogs. They are each something else first. In some cases “what they are” is something entirely unique and innovative, and it is precisely this multi-faceted phenomenon of functional innovation on the internet that is the really salient reason why the web is changing everything.

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