Fun with SpinVox
Today I got into the beta program for SpinVox, a service which converts your voicemail into text. My first impressions are pretty positive. I set up my phone to forward to their service and had a few people call and try it out.
Callers get a very brief note about the service (I assume this will end with the beta) and then get what sounds like my voicemail (I setup the greeting the same as before). After they leave a message, I get both an SMS and email with the text of the message.
You received a new voicemail from +1XXXXXXXXXX: --------------- Hey Dan. This is Brandon. I'm leaving you a voice message like you asked & it is a couple of sentences long. I hope this is good enough. Talk to you later. - Powered by SpinVox. --------------- Message received at May 1, 2007 6:36:19 PM ...
Seems pretty effective, and the translation is good. It will put in (?) for bits it isn’t sure of and ______ when there is an inaudible pause. Matt was able to trip it up with anthropodermic bibliopegy
which it translated as Asperderm Goober Apache
. I think that’s acceptable.
The biggest downside is that there’s a delay (~5 minutes) between when a message is left and I get a notification, rather than near-immediate notification with my regular T-Mobile voicemail. In most situations, this wouldn’t be a big issue. Getting a text message will actually help in many situations when I can’t check the voicemail.
I suppose the only other downside is that it will eventually cost me money to use. If the US pricing is decent, I think I’d pay for it.
In addition to consumers, they seem to be targeting carriers. This would be ideal, and might make me happier than the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail. Even better, pair the two ideas.
