Well this announcement came out of the blue for me but its awesome its here! its a new feature to Azure Voicemail for SfB Online Cloud PBX users but has been available with Exchange UM for a while.
I don’t often use voicemail a lot but anyway to quickly view what a voicemail is about is great as i can hopefully see how urgent it is, also phone numbers left in VMs are now in text in your inbox and also for users with hearing impairments its great to have voicemail as text as well.
Cloud PBX voicemail doesn’t use Exchange UM as it utilises Azure Voicemail platform. There are currently it seems seven language available for transcribing which I’m sure will grow and grow.
Language recognition is based on users language setting in voicemail and is changeable on user and tenant level. For users level Sign in to the Office 365 portal. In the portal, go to Settings and change the language to the language of your choice
This feature is enabled by default now so you don’t have to do anything ! unless as an administrator you want to disable that is.
As admin Turn off at tenant level
Set-CsOnlineVoicemailPolicy -EnableTranscription $false
or for a user Grant-CsOnlineVoicemailPolicy -PolicyName TranscriptionDisabled -Identity sip:brucewayne@ucmart.co.uk
So heres a test drive of the new feature.
I called my Cloud PBX PSTN number from my mobile and call was forwarded to voicemail and i left a message as Dave.
In the voicemail i said “ Hi Martin, its Dave just wondering if you could give me a call back please as i don’t to talk to you about something, thank you, bye bye.
So it didn’t transcribe it 100% but overall it transcribed the message well but missed out the person name.
Also it mentions below “Transcription service is in preview state”
If you follow the feedback you can leave feedback and comments on the transcription
I left some more messages and it wasn’t catching peoples names or numbers, suggested a few times i said I’m off today which i didn’t say and added a time for a meeting which i didn’t say so its work in progress.
Tried to leave phone number and this message didn’t transcribe at all.
No name mentioned and it suggested a time for the meeting which i didn’t say.
This one had a phone number but missed the first zero and added extra numbers.
I think the transcription will without a doubt get better as it learns more and it does mention transcription in preview and will improve.
I think its great to have and Exchange UM transcription wasn’t 100%. I do wonder how it will cope with accents though.
Also i think its a good idea to let your users know this feature is enabled now.
References
Change VM Language for whole tenant
Martin Boam's Microsoft Blog 