Cool Product: GotVoice

Read Your Voice Mail as Text

GotVoice is a voice mail consolidation service that allows you to retrieve (for lack of a better term) voice mail from several different sources and handle them all through your email.

You can either set up your cell phone to forward to the GotVoice service instead of your provider's default voice mail service, or you can have GotVoice call in to retrieve your voice mail periodically through out the day. (If your provider supports it, forwarding is a much slicker option. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon all support this.) Then GotVoice converts your voice mail to an MP3 file and emails it to you for you to listen to, forward on like regular email, or save and cherish for years to come.

Where the real fireworks begin is that GotVoice also transcribes your voicemail to text and includes that in the email as well! This not only makes voice mail much faster to process, but also makes it searchable!

And if that wasn't enough, you can also opt to have them send that transcribed message as a text message to your cell phone for no additional cost! How's that for handy?

The Voice-to-Text service is pretty accurate, too. Propper names get a little mixed up (Ray Schulz became Ray Charles) but the rest of the text is, for the most part, spot on. (I suspect they have a bank of human typists -perhaps in India- manually transcribing random messages all day long.)

I have been using the service for nearly a year and I'm extremely impressed. I don't see how I could do with out it now, especially since we have two cell phones and never remembered to check for new messages when we got home. This makes it all fast and easy and and infinately more manageble.

Combining this service with Gmail adds another level of powerful versitility as we can then also opt to have voice mail for our home phone automatically forwarded to Kristi's work email so she can get it too. And the searchable nature of Gmail makes finding past voice mails easy as pie (you can also search by phone number which makes it very exact). Gmail also allows to to play MP3 attachements right from inside the browser with out needing to open a separate audio player, which you will realize is extremely nice if you've ever waited for iTunes to load just to hear a few seconds long sound file.

The service costs $5/month for up to 3 phones and 20 voice-to-text transcriptions, and $10/month increses it to 40 transcriptions. There is also a free version of the service, but it's so limited that it's hardly worth noting.

www.GotVoice.com