Voicemail is Dead. Long Live Voicemail.

By Ben Gross
in

Every once in a while a new product makes you realize that all previous iterations were terrible and that you have no interest in switching back. Testing voicemail transcription services has had this effect for me. I have found that most people like listening to their voicemail about as much as they like getting their teeth drilled, but yet voicemail is also seen as a necessary evil in modern life. Few people wish they could return to the days of telephone answering machines, fewer can justify the cost of a full time answering service and fewer still can afford an administrative assistant to answer their calls.

Transcription-based answering services have long been the providence of doctors, lawyers and other professionals who could easily justify the costs. PhoneTag, SpinVox and GotVoice are three new services that combine message preprocessing, automatic speech recognition and an inexpensive global labor force for manual transcription to lower the price point of voicemail transcription to the point that is attractive to an average business user. Each of these vendors offers a bundle of 40 voicemail transcriptions a month for $10 USD and 25 cents a message afterwards. Larger blocks of transcriptions are available as well.

Visual voicemail and voicemail delivered as audio attachments have been two of the greatest advances in voicemail in the last decade. Both of these features remove some of the overhead of voicemail and allow for more flexible and efficient management. Fundamentally both still require that individuals take the time to listen to each message, if only to delete them immediately. None of the services are perfect, but after testing voicemail transcription services for several weeks I don’t miss visual voicemail.

Each of the transcription-based services is capable of unifying the voicemail multiple phone lines for the base price. All transcriptions are delivered as email messages by default, usually within five minutes. Transcriptions can be delivered as email, SMS or both. GotVoice and PhoneTag include the original audio as an attachment in the email message containing the transcription. SpinVox requires that you listen to the original audio by calling your voicemail number or via a Web interface.

I found using SMS for transcription delivery to be a bit unwieldy as long voicemails would be spread across multiple SMS messages. GotVoice and PhoneTag optionally provide notification via SMS without the full transcription. The benefit is that if I am out of a coverage area for a time, say in a building or in the subway, I will immediately receive notifications of missed calls when I have coverage once again. The SMS notifications are also useful as they provide call envelope information such as the caller’s name (if you have used the address book function also available with GotVoice and PhoneTag), caller’s number, and call duration.

Voicemail 

In the U.S., typically all mobile carriers include voicemail with their service. Nearly all modern corporate phone systems, PBXs and VoIP services include voicemail. Voicemail is typically an optional feature for traditional landline service. While each of the services provide you with a direct number for voicemail, the majority of subscribers replace their existing voicemail through forwarding unanswered calls to the new voicemail service. Instructions for switching to a new voicemail service differ as forwarding mechanisms vary across systems. Configuring forwarding is further complicated by the fact that there are generally four kinds of call forwarding: forward in all cases, forward on busy, forward on no answer, and forward on unavailable (for mobile phones). All GSM-based mobile phones have a standard mechanism to change the forwarding using GSM feature codes. Many handsets have simplified user interfaces for changing forwarding directly on the phone. The process is fairly simple and easy to reverse if you ever want to switch back. One important point is that built it voicemail functions, such as the iPhone’s visual voicemail, will no longer work as you will be using a different voicemail system. Each of the services offers a standard voicemail feature where you can call and retrieve your messages as well as a Web-based interface to display and play messages.

GotVoice is unique in its ability to directly interact with many voicemail systems. For supported systems, GotVoice is able to directly connect and retrieve messages at scheduled intervals as low as 30 minutes, as well as silently deliver voicemail (the recipient’s phone never rings) and even deliver voicemails that were directly forwarded to GotVoice back into the original voicemail system. This last feature is beneficial, as it allows users to take advantage of GotVoice’s voicemail transcription as well as any existing visual voicemail system. Finally, GotVoice offers users the ability to upload greetings to their existing voicemail systems and to use the silent delivery feature to broadcast messages. SpinVox offers a number of non-voicemail related features such as the ability to transcribe memos post to blogs and social network services that I discussed in my previous column.

PhoneTag claims its transcriptions are about 95 percent accurate. This seems roughly accurate from my own use. This level of accuracy is nowhere perfect, but aside from checking the included audio attachment in the course of the review, I have never had a need to listen to the original message that has been transcribed.

Importing Contacts

Both GotVoice and PhoneTag support importing contacts from an existing address book. In each case, the contacts feature clearly could use improvement, although is at a disadvantage for not offering the feature at all. PhoneTag has the more rudimentary import mechanism, but uses it to the greatest benefit. First, the name in the address book is used to improve transcription of the calling parties greeting. Second, the name is used in the notification envelope information to allow the user to quickly scan and see who called. Third, the email address is used to set the Reply-to: header in the transcribed, which allows the user to easily reply to a voicemail in email. Overall, PhoneTag’s contact management is weak. Contacts can only be imported wholesale via VCard or CSV, there are no options to add, edit, delete or otherwise manage contacts. In addition, there is no mechanism to synchronize contacts. This means if you want to change any of your contacts you have to upload your entire address book again, which wipes out the existing set of contacts and replaces them with new ones. There are only a limited number of import options and effectively no documentation on the import process to help you along. PhoneTag did say they are looking into synchronization options. GotVoice has completely different import options, but in many ways is also weak. The service supports importing from AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! as well as directly from Outlook and Outlook Express. Users of any other Web mail or desktop email applications have no other options other than to use one of the supported services as a conduit. Contacts may be added, edited and managed manually within GotVoice. SpinVox has no contact management support.

Another useful feature offered by GotVoice and PhoneTag is a special email address that you can forward an audio file to and it will be treated as a voicemail and then transcribed. This feature is meant as a transcription solution for corporate messaging systems that attach voicemails to emails. I found this feature very useful as it allows me to transcribe messages from an existing voicemail to audio attachment service. GotVoice provides additional access with a Yahoo! Widget, a Windows-based message center. PhoneTag has a beta visual voicemail application for a number of Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices to provide visual voicemail directly on the handset. PhoneTag is currently offered in both English and Spanish. SpinVox is available in International English, French, Spanish and German. GotVoice is currently available in English.

As much as I like these services, each has a number of things that could be improved. In addition to the limited support for contact management, the Web-based interface to voicemail of all three services is a bit clunky and there is no Web-based version optimized for mobile phones without dedicated applications. The user configuration and management interfaces on all services could use streamlining, as they are a bit clunky.

Pricing

All three services have a variety of pricing in place for business, as well as carriers in addition to consumer-based pricing. All prices noted here are in U.S. dollars. PhoneTag has three pricing tiers, an à la carte plan that costs $0.35 a message, a plan that includes 40 messages a month for $10 and an unlimited plan for $30. GotVoice has a larger number of options, including an advertising supported free option which does not include any transcription, only allows one scheduled voicemail retrieval a day and is missing other niceties such as mp3 attachments, RSS feeds or the ability to support call forwarding. GotVoice’s paid plans range from $5 for 20 transcriptions, $10 for 40 transcriptions, $25 for 100 transcriptions. SpinVox offers service in the U.S. through its partner uReach, which is $10 for 40 transcriptions. SpinVox also partners with Line1 Communications that offers à la carte transcriptions for $0.44 a message, $10 for 25 transcriptions, $25 for 75 transcriptions and $50 for 175 transcriptions. GotVoice offers a 14-day free trial, PhoneTag offers a 7-day free trial and SpinVox offers a free 7-day trial through Line1 Communications in the U.S.

GotVoice offered me a special URL for a 30-day free trial rather than the regular 7-day free trial.

Published December 1, 2008