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Comment by tengbretson | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if this is just me, but I swear in the nearly 10 years I have used google voice the voicemail transcription has gotten steadily worse. I remember when I joined I was blown away by how good it was and now I don't even bother reading them anymore. They're worse than useless.

Or maybe all of my acquaintances have started mumbling more.

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The Android swipe-style typing accuracy has also gone steadily down over time to the point where it regularly chooses letter combinations that aren't real words. I suspect that it's because they allow their training corpuses to be polluted by trash from random users because it's "smarter that way".

I miss the Windows Phone keyboard on a daily basis, I find it baffling that Google's keyboard is still so much worse.

Not just you, it was really good 10 years ago, Today, it's pure garbage, I never depend on it anymore. I listen to the voicemail 100% of the time now. A part of me thinks it's probably perfect now and they just feed us garbage data not to freak us out.

I don't use the text transcripts all that much but I haven't noticed any degradation.

But let's posit that it has degraded. What could have happened? Let's assume that use of Google Voice has increased (non-obvious) but that Google assigned resources have not. Perhaps processing power spent on the voice to text analysis has been reduced? That's my best theory on how a degradation in this service may have occurred.

the Google search has gotten terrible lately

Have to agree... I sometimes get messages transcribed with phone numbers VERY different from the spoken phone number that gets injected. Kind of embarrassing at times when I just click to followup with someone.

Aside: been really scared of losing GV, been a user since it was Grand Central before Google's buyout. May have to bookmark this post to look at some of the mentioned alternatives. I wouldn't mind paying like $5/month or so if I can find a decent option, but definitely need short code support.

I've been using it for 10 years as well. I haven't noticed it getting better or worse during this span. It's never been perfect, but it's always been good enough.

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