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posted by takyon on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the talking-to-strangers dept.

Apple is testing a service that will let Siri answer, record and transcribe your calls:

Apple's iCloud service will then send you the text of the transcribed voicemail — meaning that you'll never need to listen to your voicemails again.

[...] Here is how it works: When someone using iCloud Voicemail is unable to take a call, Siri will answer instead of letting the call go to a standard digital audio recorder.

iCloud Voicemail can relay information about where you are and why you can't pick up the phone to certain people. But the coolest feature of the service is that Siri will transcribe any incoming voicemails, just like it does with anything else you say to it.

Since they're replicating a service that carriers already provide, could this be another indication Apple is looking to become its own cellular carrier?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:44PM (#217907)

    Does anyone know of any offline text to voice software I can get for free? Ideally open source as well. It doesn't even need to be very good.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by middlemen on Tuesday August 04 2015, @02:20PM

    by middlemen (504) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @02:20PM (#217919) Homepage

    Festvox: http://www.festvox.org/festival/ [festvox.org]. You should be able to get it on Debian/Ubuntu using apt-get.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:16PM (#217943)

      Thanks, looks like exactly what I need.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by chrysosphinx on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:48PM

    by chrysosphinx (5262) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:48PM (#218111)

    espeak http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] is in almost every linux distro, it works slightly better with mbrola phonems http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html [fpms.ac.be] , some people even managed to convert it to a true vocaloid http://alternativeto.net/software/vocaloid-3/?license=opensource [alternativeto.net]

    I am still happy with it's default robotic voice, though.