Tired of sitting and waiting through a chain of voicemails to see if any of them are important to you? Silicon Valley-based Pinger has a new web-centric answer to the problem. I’ve used Pinger in the past because it’s a convenient way to broadcast text-based messages and e-mail attachments to a group by recording just one voice message. Now, the company has added a free (or primarily free) visual voicemail service for mobile phones to the mix. I wish the service supported more service providers—currently only Alltel, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon are supported—but it works well and can definitely save you time if you get a lot of voicemail messages.
The Pinger visual voicemail service collects voicemails from your mobile phone (if you use one of the providers above) and shows easy-to-navigate envelope information about each sender, plus the length of the message left, and the date and time the message came in. I tried it with a T-Mobile phone and it worked well. To sign up you dial 408-916-5008 from your mobile phone and follow the instructions. Note that Pinger’s service is free, but carriers may charge normal rates for phone calls, text messages and call forwarding.
Pinger lets you manage your voicemail account from the web, so you can access the messages and make your replies online. You can also reply to and forward messages directly from your voicemail without making separate calls, and, if you choose, you can store voicemails in perpetuity.
The new voicemail features are in addition to Pinger’s traditional focus on letting you send text messages and e-mail attachments to groups with just one voice message. You can save groups—such as your direct web worker colleagues—and then tell the group the same text-based thing with one call.
If you like Pinger, also definitely look into Jott, a useful free service that lets you record a voicemail message, then transcribes it via speech recognition, and sends it either as a text message or an e-mail. You can also choose to have it sent to a number of online sources, including Remember the Milk, Twitter, Vitalist, WordPress, Blogger, Google Calendar, Jaiku, Vitalist, and more. Using your voice while on the go to add reminders to, say, Google Calendar can be very useful. Also see my previous post on free phone-based applications.
Do you use visual voicemail or another phone-based way to stay organized?
[...] was announced yesterday and is available to customers on AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Alltel. Bookmarking:These icons [...]
[...] Malik, Thursday, February 7, 2008 at 7:45 AM PT Comments (0) * WebWorkerDaily: Pinger’s visual voice mail reviewed. Its pretty [...]
I’d love to use this with my Sprint phone. Any idea when Sprint will be a supported carrier?
[...] users. Fear not! A few days back, I came across this new visual voicemail service from Pinger (via Web Worker Daily). Pinger has been offering a free messaging service much like Jott, but I like Jott better because [...]
O gawd, thank you for letting me know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I work for a large western canada based telco that has perhaps one of the most backward gawd awful vmail system. I was recently hired to do QA testing on the system, they give their system a nice “ip messaging” name but really its a 1980′s vmail system (just by inspecting the config files). I don’t have alot of experience with vmail, I took the job because of the messaging bait and switch technique they used, but I can’t see why anyone would pay a monthly fee for this crap. I use a digital answering machine which suits me fine, but Pinger sounds like a great service.
[...] voicemail messages and avoid having to listen to them all in linear fashion. I recently wrote about Pinger, a good, free application for doing this, and also for sending broadcast messages to colleagues [...]
[...] Pinger: Pinger makes it easy for you to see your voicemail messages in linear fashion, as well as send broadcast messages from your cell phone. [...]