• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 13, 2010

Voice calls on devices other than traditional telecom services like AT&T and Verizon took an interesting turn in the past year. Google Voice and other similar services hold real promise for advertising and marketing execs at companies looking for quality leads, especially small-to-medium size businesses

Transcribing conversations to track words as callers speak with a sales or company representative, or transcribing voice into text to leave a message, analyze keywords and sentence structure, provides insight into intent. It allows brands to determine a good from a bad sales lead.

I've become fascinated with the possibilities of voice-to-text translation after Google recently introduced voice in Gmail. You not only hear the inflection of the person's voice, but also see their word choice. Maybe I'm reading too much into the service, but I think Google could provide numerous advertising options to keep its service free, including sponsored links at the bottom of each message.

Google Analytics could add a tool to analyze the structure of voice messages, matching AdWords ads to the message, tracking it back to the person calling, and serving up a related ad. Or, Google could simply provide something similar to the service Telmetrics launched Monday.

Toronto-based Telmetrics began offering transcription data with VoiceTrends a speech-to-text analytics service to support the local search industry, which lets advertisers, agencies, publishers and search engine marketers break down a sentence by looking at the structure. It aims to help find quality leads by analyzing the conversation on calls made to phone numbers mentioned in various kinds of ads

Telmetrics' VoiceTrends matches call dialogue to paid keywords and client or category-specific lead conversion topics to measure the effectiveness and value of keyword campaigns and online or offline lead sources. It does this by transcribing consumer calls to businesses, tracking the phrases and words most commonly spoken to help identify a caller's intent and the quality of the lead.

Hearing the words that appear in the ads during the conversation makes it a valuable call, explains Bill Dinan, Telmetrics president. "We start going through the transcribed conversation to find the keywords," he says. "We're looking for the action words, the ones that indicate the person needs an appointment or oil change for their car."

Telmetrics creates a keyword cloud, scoring the words to create value from the call through the VoiceTrends tool.

Dinan says VoiceTrends provides data from calls across any platform. The ability to analyze sentences to determine intent allows the "art of science to improve the art of marketing."

A handful of companies began testing the service three months ago. Kathleen DeCaire-Aden, Wahlstrom CEO, believes having the ability to identify a caller's intent is crucial for optimizing ad campaigns and shows additional proof of return on investment.