Voice mail to text messages

I just heard about a company that converts your voice mails to text messages. You just forward unanswered calls to their gateway, instead of your regular voicemail.

Their computer then interperets the voice mail, and sends you a text message with maybe one or two words wrong of the voice message.

I just contacted them to ask them if the service is available in Germany, and they said not yet. Now I could set this up for them here, and am going to tell them that. First I want to see what other people think of the idea.

I think its brilliant. You get the phone number, and probably the message without having to call in. Its much easier than trying to write down a phone number with the phone in your ear. Of course if the software can't interperet the message you can still call in and listen to it.

So would you use such a service. Lets say it costs about Euro 30 for 100 messages.

At the moment it only works in English, but most of my voice mails are in English.

Hmmm, Well I don't think I'll use the enthusiasm generated here to make a marketing case for bringing this to Germany.

well, I only just saw this. The site is really busy right now so you to catch threads early otherwise they disappear to page 2

I personally would love this, I have 13 messages from suppliers on my mailbox right now and just can't face listening tot hem dribbling on at me about nothing when they could have just sent me an e-mail or an SMS.

But would it work if some messages are in Englsih and some in German? That would be a clever system... but highly unlikely... and thinking about the voice recognition, it would need to be excellent to understand my Taiwanese and scandinavian contacts...

MadAx: you must have weird friends if their voice mails can be summarised in 160 characters...

160?! why, with my gorgeous Siemens phone (ok, call me biased) and of course Vodaphone, I sent a 660 character message to my flatmate this weekend.. it just gets split into 3 SMS's and sent that way.

Sorry... if you're not available and they need to chat loger than to give a name and number and the basic subject, they can flipping well wait until you can take part in the conversation.

It took me years, but in the end I played my mum's messages back to her to show her... I had to listen to all that crap first, then call her so she could tell me it all again anyway! [img]http://www.keydeck.com/smilies/furious.gif[/img]

an email would be handy alright.

Jordigo: "See you in Gunthers at eight o'clock for food and beers"

55 characters - no message could be more important

point taken. but only if the system is intelligent enough to split out the fluff

"oh bollocks it's your voice mail again. hey, listen it's me. uh just calling to see if you wanted to meet up. so if you do I'll" <insert keydeck 55character message here> "ok so gimme a shout if you're going to be late. alright catch you later. bye." = 260 characters or thereabouts

Fair point, furry muff.

So I won't see you in Gunthers at 8pm for food and beer then. I guess it wouldn't have happened anyway given that I am living in a different place. Bis spater!

160 characters on the button

In addition to Keydeck's excellent contribution, most voice mails are "Oh bollox, look call me back".

I do have strange friends, but most men leave messages for me that could be fit in 50 characters.

160 characters ??? Blood luxury, when I was a young mobile phone engineer we thought 2.5 bits was a lot!!!
2.5 bits you lucky bastard, we invented quantum mechanics because we couldn't afford a whole bit.

A feature I did not put in in the first post is that if you have many voice mails, and you want to listen to only one of the, the text message gives you an index to get right to the voice mail you want, without listening to the others when you are perfectly happy with the translation of them.

Hi,
No I wouldn't pay for such a service, but thanks for asking!
UrbanAngel

Interesting. I could see it becoming the next thing we didn't know we couldn't live without. :-)

good service idea, especially if you get to chose between an sms and an eMail or both. But the price is a bit high. I can only imagine corporate customers taking on this service and then only if they were to get a discount or had money to burn.

well, it sounds like a good idea, doesn't it... but really, I think that a taker-upper would fall into the "more money than sense" category in my book.
but that could just be because I'm from Yorkshire...