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FacebookSpinvox: The Next Killer App. for Cell Phones
February 24th, 2007 | Posted in Web Design 7 Comments »
If you don’t enjoy listening to voicemail on your cell phone, check out Spinvox. This service converts your voicemail messages to text and then emails you the message. Right now you can sign up for a year’s service for free by e-mailing gamma@spinvox.com with the request.
Two U.S. competitors to Spinvox are Simulscribe and Callwave. But with Spinvox, not only can you have the transcribed voicemail sent to your email or cell phone (although your cell carrior charges for incoming text msgs), you can also convert text messages into voicemail. And you can also leave memos for yourself, and even blog by voicemail.
The drawbacks? I believe the one-year free account limits you to basic conversion options. And if I had to pay for the service, it would be prohibitively expensive ($20/month to convert 50 msgs). Still, it might be something I find I can’t live without. Here’s a sample converted message.
The transcription was mostly accurate, but I changed the names and phone number above for privacy.
Always a bit skeptical about free services, I called Verizon twice to see if there were hidden charges associated with the service. Verizon is ignorant about the service, and Spinvox claims there aren’t fees — only charges for incoming text messages on my cell. I’ll have to wait and see to know for sure.
Most frustrating, I wanted to call my own cell number to leave messages for myself, which would then be transcribed. Apparently Verizon says I can’t call my own cell phone directly.
I learned about Spinvox from David Pogue’s latest podcast. (I highly recommend his podcast, by the way.)
Great post. This is some incredible technology. Spinvox’s spinmyblog is also very cool. It allows you to update your blog by just speaking, which is then converted to text onto your blog.
Here is the U.S., you can only use the voice to text conversion (for free). If you want to use the memo service, you’d have to call a number in the UK. I’m assuming it’s the same with the voice to blog service. But the voicemail number is localized (at least to Florida, where I live). I can’t really imagine speaking my blogs. I am not that articulate in speech to not have to edit and slowly think out what I want to write.
If you would like to try spinvox, you can. Here’s an e-mail I received from them:
“Hi, we hope you are enjoying your SpinVox Voicemail-to-Text service.
As you were one of the first to try SpinVox, we’d like to offer you 5 FREE accounts for you to give to your friends and colleagues.
All you need to do is tell your friends to send an email to spinx@spinvox.com with the subject “VIP Referral” and we’ll contact them to arrange their voicemail-to-text service. If you prefer to send us an email with your 5 email addresses, we will simply contact them directly for you.
If you have any feedback about your experience of the service we’d be very happy to hear and act upon it. Simply email us at spinx@spinvox.com.
Thank you.
The Spin-X team”
So if you want to get a free account, go for it. I have to say that I was pretty impressed by the service, but after a while I decided it wasn’t for me. Here’s why. I decided to buy a belt clip for my cell phone, and wear it more consistently. As a result, I am able to answer 90% of the calls. For those I don’t answer, hearing the voicemail isn’t that much of an annoyance.
I would have really liked to use the voice to memo service, but right now you can only use that by calling a number in England.
When you just dial in to hear your voicemail, the Spinvox greeting isn’t as clear as the Verizon one. I did verify, however, that the Spinvox voicemail number is a local number. I didn’t want to be calling England every time I checked my voicemail.
Finally, I’m usually gone all day at work, and I had the voice to text configured to send email to my home address. So it wasn’t very useful because I wouldn’t get to the email until evening.
What most people don’t know is that the U.S. is way behind the rest of the world in cell phone technology. I’m not sure why, but it’s like we’re in the dark ages.
I think some time its happen.But nowadays cellphone also increase more problems.
Sounds good, but are we looking at say $10 + fees = $30 ?
That is exactly why I never bought the service. I think companies need to find a way to make their products free or extremely affordable — esp. when it’s a new service.
If everyone is labouring under the impression that Spinvox is a killer app, then you are all sorely mistaken.
Spinvox is a voice mail service that is then transcribed by agents in a call centre and sent out as an sms. So – no amazing technology there. Just a bunch of data captures.