The Great Fallibility of Google Voice (Transcriptions)

[daemonelix]

I have Google Voice forward messages left on my phone to my email, as I check my email an awful lot more than I check my phone. Google Voice has the often amusing feature of automatic transcriptions of messages. A particularly funny one just landed in my inbox:

Hey Brad, it's mama just calling to. It's about quarter or 20 of sex and I'm done. And I wanted to pick you guys up. So what I'll do it is my email. By the way wasn't working. I'll try again but if I hadn't wasn't working before. So Yeah, I'll So if you could just give me a call. That would be great. I what I will to make it easier. Bye.

Google Voice is extremely confused as to what my name is (I wish there were a way to teach it things, like names, that might be a little less common than other words!): My name (top-secret!) has been alternately transcribed as Randy, Ryan, Brad, Danny, Brandon, Maria, Lauren (in a message where "Daddy" was transcribed as "Jenny," no less), "mind", "man" (in a message where "Dad" became "blah") ... Evidently my real name sounds like a whole bunch of guys' names, if you hear them through some static and a really bad transcription system.

Edit: Google Voice did get my real name right at least once that I found, so it obviously can transcribe it correctly. I wonder what this says about our cell phone service?