GotVoice: Visual Voicemail isn't Perfect, But it's Good Enough
If you use an iPhone, you’re already familiar with being able to see your voicemail messages on your phone and sort quickly through to the ones you want to hear right away. Especially, if you get a lot of voice messages, it’s a time-saver. I’m already a fan of Pinger, which gives you similar service free of charge that doesn’t require an iPhone, and recently I’ve been experimenting with the free service from GotVoice.
GotVoice has both a free service and a premium service. The main attractions are having your voicemail messages converted to MP3s or text and available on your phone. The premium service, for $10 a month, checks your voicemail every 30 minutes and converts your voicemail messages to text.
One of the main reasons I started using Pinger was that you can broadcast messages to multiple people, and GotVoice lets you broadcast as well. My only complaint in trying out the free service was that messages sometimes showed up a couple of hours after they came in, but for the most part they showed up promptly. Transcription accuracy wasn’t perfect, but it never is, and it is good enough to let you evaluate whether you want to listen to a message in its entirety. If you start using the service a lot, I would recommend paying the $10 monthly for the premium service.
I liked the fact that GotVoice can save your messages indefinitely, and you can also use contact filters so only your most important messages get transcribed. GotVoice also has a blog where you can see example applications for the service, and there is a professional service available with extra features for small business users.
GotVoice works seamlessly with Sprint/Nextel, and is very easy to get up to speed with. As is the case with all of the visual voicemail offerings, the real utility of the service depends on how bombarded you are with voicemail messages. If you get a lot of them, though, being able to avoid listening to all your messages in linear form saves lots of time.
Do you use visual voicemail or any other useful mobile phone applications?
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A lot of advanced voicemail providers are wising up to the fact that most consumers and businesses are going mobile. In the commercial sector especially it’s so easy to stay professional while on an iPhone or a Blackberry that there’s no need to do business anywhere else. I haven’t signed up for any of these stand-alone offerings because my advanced 1-800 (interestingly, named Gotvmail) has the similar “play it on mobile” feature that sends messages to your cell. These features often come free with vamil packages, which are a better deal for businesses. For consumers, however, this is a great service, especially since for the time being it has a free option.
I use CallWave. It actually replaces your carrier’s voicemail with their system. They offer online visual voicemail, as well as the option to receive a text message and/or email (with .wav attachment) of your voicemails. The text and email messages include a summary (which they call “gist”) of the voicemail. Most of the speech-to-text is OK – they seem to really have focused on catching phrases like “important”, “as soon as possible”, “emergency”, “let me know”, etc.
Overall I’ve been happy with it – and it’s free.
(There’s also a dashboard widget for Mac OS X.)
I have been using YouMail.com for a while and am quite happy with them. I like their interface a bit more then the GotVoice interface.
I use Callwave too
(you can read my review here:
http://small-business-phone.com/?cat=9)
There is still a free trial, although after the trial it’s $14.95/mo. Still worth it, in my opinion. I listen in to my voicemails ‘live’, and if it’s someone I want to talk to, I can press a button and start talking to them. And with the voice to text feature, I can get the ‘gist’ of the email by reading the txt msg (versus having to listen to the whole dang thing).
Check it out, it’s worth the free trial, at least.
J.B. Malik
http://small-business-phone.com/?cat=9
Very cool, nice one WWD.
http://www.itrush.com
I too have used YouMail.com and yep their interface is a bit better than GotVoice. I for one have an iPhone and really, really love visual voicemail. I can’t even imagine dealing with voicemail in any other way. In fact, I simply forwarded my office phone for good.