Facebook Messenger offers the ability to send voice clips to your friends without typing any text. Now Facebook is testing a feature that helps people read the voice clips that were received instead of having to play them out loud. This can be useful if you are at a quiet library or a loud concert.
To send a voice message on Facebook Messenger, tap on the microphone icon to record a message. After you send the message, Facebook will transcribe it for users. Next to the voice message is an icon with three lines. Tapping on that icon auto-creates the transcription of the voice message. The transcript accuracy depends on interference, accents and the clarity of the call. “Our plan is to test this feature at a tiny scale for now and we’re looking forward to seeing what you think of it before making the experience more widely available,” said David Marcus, the vice president of messaging products at Facebook in a post.
Facebook’s voice-to-text feature is similar to the way Google Voice works. Google Voice turns voicemail messages into text and sends it to the inboxes of its users. The accuracy of the Google Voice transcriptions have plenty of room for improvement, but it seems to be getting better over time. This will be the same case for Facebook Messenger.
Earlier this month, Facebook acquired speech recognition company Wit.ai. Wit.ai offers an API for developers to add voice control to their products by adding a few lines of code. Wit.ai is being used by more than 6,000 developers and is powering hundreds of apps and devices. “Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone and build amazing experiences for the over 1.3 billion people on the platform – technology that understands natural language is a big part of that, and we think we can help,” said Wit.ai in a blog post.
Facebook’s Voice To Text Feature / Credit: David Marcus
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/01/20/facebook-is-testing-a-voice-to-text-feature-for-its-messenger-app/
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