Have you ever been too busy to check in with your voicemail service? PhoneTag might have the solution for you.
Some of us might have done it before, let voicemails pile up if we know nothing urgent or important is coming down the pipes. Wouldn’t it be much simpler and more convenient if those voicemails played by our rules? PhoneTag is a speech to text service that converts a voicemail into text and sends it via email or SMS which you can read through and reference at will. The accuracy on this type of service is usually pretty good, but some translation is required as spoken words can sometimes be misinterpreted depending on the clarity of the call. On the security side of things, we tend to be a little hesitant of personal and business voicemails running through an extra service. PhoneTag does state that they use some kind of “special algorithm” that will guarantee voicemails are secure and private.
While there is a free trial period, this service is going to cost you. You can sign up for anything from a per message price of $.35 to an unlimited plan of $29.95/month. You are going to have to do your own calculations here to see if this is the best way to go, but this will save you from using your monthly minutes for checking the voicemails in your mailbox. As alternatives, Google Voice offers the same service for free and SpinVox charges a fee per use.
Spinvox is totally discredited and is widely suspected of almost being all manually translated. I suspect the Phone Tag “special algorithm” is a bunch of people in a far flung location.
this seems to be a bit of a advertisement Chris Gilmer ….
also CaPs WtF ?
this advertisement brought to you by hackaday
as mentioned in the blurb, google voice is currently providing this for free. i find that it mangles messages of a few of my less literate friends, but by and large is pretty accurate.
google voice is nice, it sends a copy of the voicmail to you via email as well as a transcript of the message and it is free.
I currently use YouMail and find that it’s a much better service than phonetag. I switched from phonetag about two months ago and I’ve never looked back. YouMail adds custom greetings per caller with the default being that it reads the caller id info and says the caller’s name. I get a lot of compliments on that alone.
I’m waiting on my Google Voice invite, but I don’t know if I like the idea of changing my phone number. It’s printed in a lot of places and I’m not sure how a forward would work out with cell provider charges.
I think I actually like the idea of some kind of hybrid of Google Voice for handling live calls, but still sending voicemail to YouMail… unless Google can add the custom greetings. Then maybe it would be a total solution.
I won’t know until I have an invite though… anyone have one they’d care to give me? Or is it all still in-house handled by Google?
@archaic0:
I don’t see anywhere to invite people to Google Voice when I log into it, I think it’s up to Google when it happens. It didn’t take all that long to get an account, from what I remember.
I got an invite to Google Voice pretty quickly after signing up (a few days, maybe a couple weeks? who knows). A friend of mine signed up after I showed it to him and he also got invited quickly.
Verizon customers have Visual Voice mail as an integrated option for some PDA Phones. There is a charge. Don’t use it so can’t guess if its done by ‘puter or underpaid, english as a second language, operator. -N3rd
Where’s the hack? All I see is an advertisement for a special introductory offer.
This is not a hack. This is an advertisement.
1. not hack – advert
2. Caps?
3. ????
4. Profit
To hell with the service, I’m wondering about that phone setup I’m the picture. Acustic coupled answering machine?
The picture looks to be some kind of old phone recording device.
As for visual voicemail, AT&T has it with my iPhone but all that does is list your voicemails where you can choose to listen to them in an order other than they came in, or not listen to them at all. It doesn’t let you READ the message, which is the main purpose for services like YouMail and PhoneTag.
READING the voicemail and not having to play the mssage out loud is very useful and is a welcome improvement to the old ways of voicemail where you have to wait on the slow talkers to get to the point. You can scan the text of an email transcription of that same voicemail in a 10th of the time and move on with your life.
usually, the only thing Google Voice gets right is numbers, but it’s nice not to have to write them down.