I am a pretty big fan of services like Got Voice and SpinVox that essentially take your voicemails, transcribe them and send them to you as text messages for quick and easy consumption. London-based SpinVox is the big daddy amongst all these services and works with most U.S. mobile service providers. Today the company announced that now you can get Skype voicemails transcribed and sent to you via SMS. Just to be clear — I have not tried the service on Skype, so can’t vouch for it. You can try it yourself, if you’re in a hurry. This is not a cheap service: Each voicemail-to-text conversion will cost €0.20/£0.17/25 cents, plus the cost of sending an SMS message. Still, it seems like a pretty useful service, considering that we spend a lot of time away from the computer and don’t have access to Skype. Or as Stacey would like to say — one less reason to have a landline.
way expensive!!!
One thing you have not mentioned is that it is NOT REALTIME. It will take anytime from few minutes to few hours for you to get SMS. Apart from that would you pay that much to check your vocicemail? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to call skype and listen to it.
@Jonathan
I would pay the price because they are more accurate than their rivals and yes, while they are not real time, they are much faster than rivals including Got Voice. I think it depends if you do want accuracy and some kind of quality, then SpinVox does the trick.
What’s the technology behind the service? Do humans do the transcription?
SpinVox has been touting for over 3 years now that their service is automated when, in fact, it is all human transcribed. Unless you’re getting the conversion in less than 2 minutes, it’s not worth the price
I finally got to try the service; on many counts it’s a Fail. Not the quality or value of service one usually associates with Skype.
Jim
What were the specific problems you encountered?
Cheers
Spinvox was launched as a blackberry plug-in to convert voice-mail to transcription. So now without any cost we can use this service.