Just a personal/tech note.
I activated the Vonage Voicemail Transcription today on my home landline.
The idea is that, instead of having a message left on the old-school (though digital) answering machine in the apartment I get an email with a .wav file attached and the nice people at Vonage (well the computers at Vonage) transcribe the message so that you can read it in your email too.
Problem is that it costs 25 cents per transcribed message.
Its good because you can have the voicemail message sent to up to 5 email addresses and SMS addresses. I like it because I don’t have to wait to get my home messages (few and far between as they may be).
This is going too sound lazy but I like it because I don’t have to listen to the answering machine…. heck, I don’t even have to walk up to the answering machine and press play! This way it comes to me, instead of me having to come to it.
It seems to work pretty well though.
Enterprise VOIP systems already offer unified messaging services like this, maybe more telephony providers will do it too. I know I’d rather get my voicemail in my email rather than having to access a mailbox to listen to it.
Oh, another advantage is that you don’t have to listen to every message to get to the one you want. It’s a term that has been recently coined – "Visual Voicemail"
