Voice Mail Driving You Crazy? Get It In Writing

Why can't voice mail be more like e-mail?

If you get a lot of voice mail, you know the problems. You can't get an overview of your messages -- you have to deal with them one at a time, in order. You can't see who's called you. You can't prioritize, or work with your messages in random order the way you can with your e-mail, for example.

That's where the Internet comes in. The telephony revolution that began with VoIP has changed the way we use telephones by combining them with Web-based management applications. (See, for example, Review: Tangling With Twitter and Review: 6 Skype Alternatives Offer New Services.) Voice mail is an obvious target: All you have to do is turn those messages into text and send them to your in-box.

And that's exactly what several new services do. Once you sign up for the service and configure your mobile phone account, you get your voice mails as text in your e-mail. After that, you can work with them as you would any e-mail messages. You can ignore the inconsequential ones and jump right to the important ones. You can deal with the simple ones with an e-mail reply or, depending on the service, you can write a response that's delivered as a voice mail, or click on the caller's number and be connected for a callback.

This article looks at five Web-based services that do some kind of speech-to-text conversion. Some of the companies also offer related services, like letting you speak a message that's converted to text and posted to your blog, or converting faxes to e-mails:

Many of these services are aimed at businesses or mobile service providers and charge for their services, but all offer a free version as an introduction to what they can do.

Conditional Call Forwarding
How do these services work? Basically, they replace your provider's voice mail system with their own. They do this by resetting your mobile phone's "conditional call forwarding," a service that can redirect calls that go unanswered if you don't pick up, if your phone is off, or if you are out of reach.

If you elect to sign up with one of these services, then your voice mail no longer reaches your phone -- it is instead "rerouted" to the service, and translated into text. (There is one exception -- GotVoice can optionally deposit messages in your phone's voice mail system after it transcribes them).

Fortunately, you're not locked in. You can disable and re-enable conditional forwarding any time you want through your phone's menus. Just make sure to write down the phone number your voice-to-text service forwards your calls to so you can re-enter it later.

Or, better yet, create speed-dial entries for them. The set-up string the voice-mail-to-text service gives you for call forwarding will look something like "**004*myvoicemail*11#" (where "myvoicemail" would be the forwarding number of the voice-mail-to-text service). To set your phone, enter this string the way you would a phone number and press "Call" or "Send." And don't worry too much about doing something you can't change back later: Sending "##004#" should reset conditional forwarding to its defaults for your phone -- check with your service provider to make sure.

The Report Card
A voice-mail-to-text system has to do several things well. One, obviously, is to transcribe the voice message accurately enough so that you can read it. The second, not quite so obviously, is to capture and play back an audible version of the message itself so that you can review it if you need to. I've assigned letter grades to each of these factors (which I've labeled "Transcription" and "Playback"). I also rate the quality, breadth, and usability of each of the services (which I call, appropriately, "Service"), and give each a final grade.

So what can these services do for you? Let's take a look.

Jott

Jott doesn't do voice mail, but what it does do makes it the perfect introduction to voice-transcription technologies. Besides, Jott is just so darned neat you need to know about it.

Create a free account and Jott sends you a phone number. Add some contacts to your Jott directory, call the number, tell Jott who the message is for, and speak for half a minute. Your message is then sent -- either as an e-mail or an SMS message -- to one of your contacts (or to a group of people).

You can use Jott as a reminder service -- if you call the number and say "Myself" and "Conference with Sam's teacher Tuesday at 3 p.m.," in a couple of minutes that reminder will show up in your e-mail. And you can dictate messages to social-networking services like Twitter and Jaiku, and blog sites including Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress.

Jott provides a Web-based in-box/console where you can see your messages and manage your contacts, groups, and "Jott links" (a Jott link is something you can send a message to, like a blog or Twitter).

Transcription: B-. Jott's B- grade for transcription reflects the fact that voice transcription isn't a perfected art. Jott, like other services, does a fair job of recognizing words, but the niceties of written text (such as punctuation and formatted elements like dollar signs) are pretty much conspicuous in their absence. Jott misses the occasional word, but on the whole does a better job than some of the others.

Playback: A-. The quality of the recordings these services create is generally nothing to, er, call home about. But Jott's quality is better than most. On playback, the messages sound less distorted, less like phone calls and more like they've been recorded with a microphone. Jott gets an F, however, for failing to let you download and save the files, as some other services do.

Service: B. There is a Jott Express desktop application, currently in beta test, that you can download and install -- it's a clean-looking in-box for reading and managing your messages, and creating text messages to send to your contacts. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide a way to manage those contacts -- to edit names and service preferences. For that, you have to log into the Web in-box. (One feature of the app is a "Reminder," presumably a way to schedule an alert that's sent on a particular date and time, but when I tried to use it, it crashed the application. I guess that's why they call it beta.)

Bottom Line: Jott is sort of a one-trick pony, but it's a neat trick. Create a speed-dial entry for it and you'll find ways to dictate notes you wouldn't have thought of before.

SpinVox

SpinVox does voice-mail-to-text conversion, and offers some additional Jott-like voice-to-text services for memos, blog entries, and SMS messages to groups.

SpinVox seems rather bare-bones: Its lack of a Web in-box application, in particular, is a major shortcoming. It does the basics, but doesn't provide a central point for managing the application. You get the text of voice mails delivered to your e-mail in-box, but if you want to hear the message file played you must call your SpinVox voice mail number and enter the message number from the e-mail -- not as convenient as the click-to-play features of other services.

SpinVox sells its Spin-my-Vmail voice-mail-to-text service to mobile service providers. According to its Web site, the trial period for Spin-my-Vmail is closed, but you may be able to obtain an account by e-mailing a request to [email protected]. You can sign up for the related Spin-my-Blog and Spin-my-Broadcast services online, and try out the Spin-my-Memo feature through the Web site.

Transcription: C. The quality of the transcription is about average -- SpinVox didn't do well with recognizing some words (for example, "work out" became "luckier(?)"), but in a long recorded message (SpinVox allows up to three minutes, longer than other services) it did well with several carefully pronounced foreign names, indicating that the speaker may influence the result. But its most annoying lack is something that all services seem to have in common: It can't convert spoken currency amounts properly to text. In order to get "$49.95" into the text you must say "forty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents" -- and even then it will probably appear as "$4995" without the decimal, which is a bit ambiguous for mission-critical business calls.

Playback: C+. The recorded messages are clear and understandable. You can access them in random order by entering the message number included in the notification e-mail. But SpinVox gets a 10-point penalty for not delivering the message as an audio file attached to the notification e-mail. Much less convenient, and there's no way to download and save the file.

Service: B-. SpinVox's Web site offers services called SpinmyMemo, SpinmyBlog, and SpinmyBroadcast. Only the memo service is bundled with the voice-mail-to-text service; the other two require separate sign-ups -- the blog-posting service works with Blogger, Vox, Livejournal, and Typepad blogs, and the broadcast service lets users create groups of contacts and send messages to them. SpinmyMemo, like Jott, allows you to dial a number and record a message of up to 30 seconds that appears in your e-mail as text.

Bottom Line: The segmentation of the service into separate products and the lack of a Web-based or desktop interface may actually be features rather than weaknesses, given that SpinVox's market is service providers and businesses rather than users. But the lack of integration and central management capabilities, unless they're added by the service providers, make SpinVox less useful than other services.

GotVoice

GotVoice captures voice mails and transcribes them to text. It also offers good messaging features -- you can use it like Jott to send voice messages from your mobile phone or from the service's Web in-box interface to individual contacts or groups. The combination seems to be especially tailored to appeal to business users.

GotVoice has a more complex set-up procedure than other services. It needs to know your phone's voice mail PIN, and if you've forgotten it, you must go through your provider's system to reset it. This minor annoyance is worth the effort -- while other voice-mail-to-text services rely on conditional call forwarding to capture your messages, not all service providers support this feature. GotVoice can use your PIN to log into your provider's voice mail system and retrieve voice mails on a schedule or on demand, so it will work even on services that don't support conditional forwarding.

There's a downloadable desktop widget that provides a user interface for this on-demand message retrieval, as well as a Web-based inbox application that lets you manage your messages and contacts, and compose outbound messages for groups of up to 20 recipients. It works well even with landline phones and home answering machines.

GotVoice isn't free. You can sign up for a two-week free trial, but after that the service will cost $9.95 a month, according to the Web site, with 40 transcribed voice mails (additional transcriptions are 25 cents each).

Transcription: B. Like the other services, GotVoice doesn't do well with names or punctuation. And while it renders numbers accurately digit-for-digit, it doesn't always format them correctly. But it did turn "thirty-six dollars and thirty-nine cents" into "$36.39" and "two percent" into "2%" and in general did a little better than some of its competitors.

GotVoice provides a Web-based in-box where new message notifications show up quickly. You can also read the transcribed text of messages and download message files from here.

Playback: C. The record quality of GotVoice messages is no better than other services -- it sounds like a phone call. On the plus side, you get good access to the message files. They can be easily downloaded from the Web in-box, and come in MP3 format.

Service: A. In addition to its mobile inbox, GotVoice does a couple of neat tricks:

Bottom Line: GotVoice has some nice features. It works even if your service provider doesn't support conditional call forwarding, and it can preserve the existing function of your provider's voice mail so that alerts and messages also appear on your phone. The outbound messaging features are strong, even though GotVoice lacks the glitz of voice-to-blog services like Jott and SpinVox. It's not free after the two-week trial -- but if you have to deal with a lot of voice mail, it might be worth the money.

CallWave

CallWave tackles the business productivity marketplace from a different angle: It wraps its voice-mail-to-text functions in a package of phone-management features.

Not only does CallWave do the basic recording, transcribing, and e-mailing of your voice mail, but it adds on several related phone services, and delivers them to either your e-mail or as text messages.

CallWave Mobile Basic service is free. CallWave Mobile Pro ($9.95 a month) adds call screening to let you listen in to voice mails as they're being left and pick up the call or transfer it to another phone. The for-pay service also provides toll-free telephone support during business hours, Pacific Time.

Transcription: D. CallWave doesn't transcribe the entirety of the message, but only the "gist." So the first and last phrases are left on the cutting-room floor. Its transcription results, like those of other services, are afflicted with nonsense words, random punctuation, and unformatted currency amounts.

Playback: C+. The audio quality of the recorded message is equivalent to a good phone connection. Playback on your PC is loud enough, but no clearer than it has to be. The message transcriptions appear quickly in your e-mail with audio files attached in .Wav format so they can be downloaded and saved easily. But you have to go to e-mail to download -- you can listen to messages from the Web-based in-box application, but you don't have access to the files there.

Service: A+. Not only does CallWave do the basic recording, transcribing, and e-mailing of your voicemail, but it adds on several related phone services. There are downloadable widgets and gadgets that display your message in-box in the Macintosh desktop, Google, MSN, and Yahoo personal portal pages, as well as a downloadable application for your desktop that CallWave calls "Internet Answering Machine."

This desktop app is the phone manager you didn't know you needed. Calls placed to your cell phone ring on your computer and you can connect them to one of six "Take the Call" transfer numbers, so you can take calls to your cell on your home or office phone -- or directly on your PC using a Skype-like VoIP application. You also can use the desktop app's contacts list as an auto-dialer -- just highlight the contact you want to call, click the "Talk" button, choose the phone you want to place the call from, and CallWave will connect them.

CallWave also offers some related applications, including a text-message widget and a fax-to-e-mail service that converts incoming faxes to PDF files and delivers them to your e-mail.

Bottom Line: CallWave has the broadest array of widgets for interacting with your messages, its voice-mail-to-text features match those of other services, and its desktop management application adds great value. If you carry a mobile phone and sit at a computer there is surely something in the CallWave suite of services that you will find useful.

SimulScribe

SimulScribe is another service clearly aimed at a business user. There are no frills, but there aren't any corners cut, either. The quality of the audio recording and transcription are matched by an easy sign-up process that includes an e-mailed page of clear instructions for configuring your call forwarding settings and voice mail account, and calling to check messages from your own phone or other phones. (It also covers using SimulScribe with landline home and office phones.)

SimulScribe offers a two-week free trial on its Web site. After that, its pricing is $9.95 a month, with 40 transcribed messages, and each additional transcription is 25 cents. Unlimited service is available for $29.95 a month.

Transcription: A. Simulscribe transcribed a short test message flawlessly -- even the dollar amounts and punctuation were rendered accurately. A longer message (you get one minute of message time) with some of vocalized hemming and hawing that are a part of everybody's normal speaking didn't do as well, but SimulScribe's software clearly flagged the words it was guessing at and still did an unequaled job of punctuation.

Playback: A-. The audio quality of recorded messages was equaled only by Jott among the services tested. Recordings are clear and well-modulated, without distortion or static or background noise. The message files can easily be downloaded from the Web-based in-box -- and you can even configure SimulScribe to deliver files in Wav, MP3, or GSM format. Unlike other services, SimulScribe requires you to install the Apple QuickTime player to play message files in the Web-based in-box.

Service: C. SimulScribe does what it does, and doesn't waste effort on extras -- but that may be an extra in itself. The Web in-box application is one clean screen with three tabs: Messages, Account Settings, and Self-Service. Incoming messages appear in the in-box when you log in or manually refresh the screen. There's no saved contact information, so messages are identified only by the caller's phone number, an introductory phrase, arrival time, and duration. (There is no mobile version of the in-box, as there is with GotVoice, but if you enter "http://m.simulscribe.com" in a browser you get back the cheery message, "Coming Soon!")

The Account Settings tab is equally Spartan, but with some interesting features. In addition to your account and billing information you can configure both e-mail and SMS delivery of message notifications and with a few check boxes set options for notification before transcription, attachment of audio and transcription files, and audio file type.

The Self-Service tab is the sparest of all -- just two buttons, one to resend the page of configuration instructions and service phone numbers to your e-mail, and the other to cancel your account.

Bottom Line: GotVoice, with its outbound messaging features, may be a better bargain for $9.95 a month if you're paying for voice-mail-to-text out your own pocket, but site licenses for business rather than single users are probably SimulScribe's marketing plan, and in the business environment its focus on the basics makes good sense. For individual users, a federation strategy might work well: Get SimulScribe for its high-quality recording and transcription, and use the free Jott service for messaging features.

Conclusion

The value of voice-mail-to-text transcription currently is in the management capabilities provided by "visual voice mail" -- seeing all your messages at once and being able to triage them quickly and efficiently. The transcription isn't yet accurate enough to depend on without reviewing the audio message as well. As accuracy improves, transcription will become more appealing to users who aren't overwhelmed by voice mail but appreciate the convenience of text.

This category of products is still so new that there's no standard set of features across the products. It would be great to have SimulScribe's accuracy of transcription and careful attention to ease of use combined with GotVoice's mobile desktop and integration with the service provider's voice mail services, Jott's messaging features, and CallWave's desktop phone-management application.

In fact, at this stage of their development, there's no reason to limit yourself to just one service. It's so easy to set up speed-dial numbers to switch your call-forwarding among services that you might use GotVoice while you're mobile to get voice mails on your provider's system, and, when you sit down again at your PC, switch to CallWave to take advantage of its call-switching features.