ON VISUAL VOICEMAIL, A "LIFE-CHANGING" SERVICE

SEEING IS BELIEVING

Well, Fred Wilson's post today pushed me over the edge and made me a SimulScribe customer.  What the heck is SimulScribe?  In industry buzzword parlance, it's a "voice-to-screen" service. 

But here's how Fred describes it:

"THIS IS A LIFE CHANGER. What Simulscribe does is reroute your voice mails to their service which is a traditional voice mail service, with the exception that it TRANSCRIBES the voice mail and emails it to you along with the wav file so you can play the original voice mail."

This was the second review on the service I'd read by someone I respect, in a couple of weeks.  David Pogue of the New York Times described the service as follows in that review:

"Two new services, SpinVox and SimulScribe, use voice-recognition software to transcribe  voice mail messages into e-mail.

Why is this a brilliant, life-changing development? Let us count the ways:"

David then goes on to give ten specific benefits of these types of services.

If all this "life-changing" stuff is starting to feel a bit familiar, think about someone else who's promising the big benefits of "voice-to-screen" technologies. 

Why, none other than Apple's Steve Jobs of course, who highlighted "Visual Voicemail" as a key, revolutionary feature of the upcoming iPhone, expected this June.

As an aside, don't you like "Visual Voicemail" more than "Voice-to-screen" as a description for the service?  Again, leave it to Apple to figure out the right words to use.

So anyway, this is a feature that's well on it's way to being introduced to mainstream audiences in force over the next few months.

But to experience it today, one can sign up with either SimulScribe or SpinVox, who currently are the XM/Sirius of the space (not necessarily in that order).  Both are trying to convert this "feature" into a hopefully robust business.

The service can get expensive, since both services charge per voicemail after a free trial period.  It can add anywhere from $10 to $40 or more to your monthly bill.  Both services will likely offer their services via your wireless carrier as an OEM provider in a few months.

In the meantime, I did sign up for SimulScribe today.  And the anecdotal experience so far has been positive.

I had it up and running in 15 minutes.  It was all automatic via email and typing in a special sequence of numbers on my Blackberry.  And I didn't have to deal with a human being especially on the Verizon customer service side.  Typing in a specific code activates or deactivates the service from your regular voicemail service with your wireless carrier.  Pretty cool.

One piece of advice though that isn't made clear on the correspondence from SimulScribe.  Make sure you've gone through all your existing voice-mails in your current service provider voice mail box, since the SimulScribe service obviously only starts to work on voice-mails going forward, NOT on unheard voice-mails already in your existing account.

Other than that, it's a pretty glitch-free experience.  The voice translation has so far been pretty cool.  The only hiccup was when I tested the service with the time-honored phrase "super-cali-fragilistic-expi-alidocious".

That came back as "Testing (garbled)".

I can live with that.  After all, it does promise to change my life, right?

P.S.  As an aside, while setting up a filter in my Google Gmail account titled "Voicemails" for my SimulScribe transcribed emails, I got a Gmail message that "system commands" cannot be used as filter tags. 

Since Google doesn't offer any voicemail services that I'm aware of, I'm wondering if they're ear-marking the "Voicemail" tag for a similar and/or other voicemail related service down the road.

Any thoughts?

P.S.2  SimulScribe charges $0.25/voice-mail beyond the 40 voice-mails per month allowed in the $10/month plan.  Currently, when a caller gets a SimulScribe subscribed phone voicemail, he/she hears a tag line that says something like "your message will be transcribed by SimulScribe.com".

As a subscriber, if you want to disable that tag, which after all is an ad for SimulScribe, you get a pop-up message that says your per message charge will GO UP by $0.05, or a nickel per call if you have the tag-line disabled.

Kind of makes you think what the value of all those free tag-lines millions of Blackberry subscribers have provided parent Resarch in Motion over the years.

You know, the ones that end every Blackberry-sent email with "Sent via my Blackberry" tag-line.  At a nickel an email, that could have added up to some serious dollars over the last few years in free advertising for Blackberry.

Comments

[notfearingchange]

Nice comments on google and blackberry (aka RIM)...just to give you the heads up - RIM which is headquartered in Waterloo ON CANADA, has a new neighbour. Google has acquired a small wireless company in Waterloo. And Google, is set to open an office of 200 end of this year in the city. In addition, from what i understand (i still need to substantiate this) Google has been acquiring wireless developers for the last little bit. Finally, University of Waterloo, neighbours the RIM business area. University of Waterloo is also one of Bill Gates' top 5 universities in N.America from which to recruit. I see interesting movements in the next few years.

[Bret]

Hi. I also read Fred Wilson's post about simulscribe. I have tried out both services and I must say that I am the happiest with spinvox. Its extremely easy to setuo, they are very automated(I got most messages within a minute), and free(well for 1 year). You should give them a try as the other services out there can get a bit pricey if you recieve alot of voicemail.

[Andy Swan]

That is so funny. My brother left the supercalafragalistic voicemail as soon as I signed up for Simulscribe....and it got it right!! I was shocked. It did spell his name wrong though haha :)