Messaging News - December 2008 - (Page 31) very 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 E On Message with Ben Gross Voicemail is Dead. Long Live Voicemail. 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 messagingnews.com 31 http://www.messagingnews.com
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