Item — HN Reader

Have you considered doing your own start up? From reading your story, I saw several opportunities. In particular

I don’t know if it’s whether they never saw my note, whether they rejected my resume silently, or whether they attempted calling my phone number (which doesn’t take calls).

stood out to me. It wasn't clear to me what happens when someone called the phone, but seemed like it rejected calls. Why not have an answering machine like service, where people can leave a message and it gets transcribed?

3 comments

There are actually answering machines for the deaf. But to use then you have to either have a tty machine, or call it through a relay service (711). But most online forms won't accept phone numbers that include the extra digits.

Conversely, the deaf can call 711 on a tty and have the operator check, and transcribe, their voicemail. But I can understand the concern they're getting it wrong, and th fact that many just don't like their privacy invaded in that fashion, and would prefer to skip voicemail, given the ubiquity of email.

That sounds like it would work pretty well. Set up voicemail, but have it mention that the person is deaf and that an SMS or e-mail would be more convenient. The tricky part is transcription. If you want better transcription than Google Voice, you have to use a human.[1] That means Mechanical Turk or a TTY operator.

My main concern is how viable such a product would be. Depending on who you ask, 0.2-0.4% of the population is considered deaf. That's not a very big potential market.

1. I find it amusing that Google Voice transcribes robot voices particularly poorly. I've had voicemails from PagerDuty transcribed as "This is the FBI" when the actual message started with, "This is PagerDuty".

> Depending on who you ask, 0.2-0.4% of the population is considered deaf. That's not a very big potential market.

It's definitely not a very big potential market, but it's a substantial sector of the population that's very, very underserved. I think that there's a lot of potential to make a decent chunk of money while doing a lot of good. I've been thinking a lot for the past year or two about technology for the blind (both in terms of assistance devices and games) and I've come to the same conclusion there, largely.

I believe Google Voice offers machine transcription of voicemails. Not perfect, but better than nothing!

I agree that this sounds like a business opportunity. Perhaps use Amazon's Mechanical Turk to outsource transcription to humans (who tend to be better at this than machines)?

Twilio do transcriptions as a built in part of their service. IIRC you have to declare the requirement as part of the dial verb. They've got very good walkthroughs that you could use to make an answerphone and have the transcriptions of all calls sent to your email account or wherever.