Comments on: Visual Voicemail Confusion

By: Skydeck : Productivity501

Skydeck : Productivity501 — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:26:34 +0000

[...] all your phone calls and gives you voice mail transcription that is quite a bit more accurate than Vonage. One of the best features is the way it adds contacts automatically. If I call a restuarant, [...]

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:09:20 +0000

@Phil – Thanks for the heads up. I tried Callwave out awhile back and was pretty impressed. I’ll have to checkout the Vtxt feature.

By: Phil @ CallWave

Phil @ CallWave — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:38:22 +0000

Good post. Visual Voicemail is a great productivity tool.

This may not help your current situation, but CallWave offers both a transcription service and visual voicemail for your cell phone. The CallWave transcription service, Vtxt, is free, as well as Visual Voicemail that can be accessed by email, on a personal PhonePage, or through widgets compatible with Apple, Google, Yahoo!, and Vista. The Vtxt can be sent to your cell phone as a text, or your email, or both. There is also an SMS widget that allows users in the United States to send text messages to each other for free.

http://www.callwave.com/

I am a product manager at CallWave and I thought that given the discussion, your readers might be interested in these productivity tools. We do not currently offer full transcription of messages, instead focusing on the gist, to allow the user to see if the call is important or not.

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:01:37 +0000

I’ll have to see if I can dig up the original message. I agree with agh3 that the times it does work correctly make it worth the times when it doesn’t.

@Bernard – I could probably ask for a refund for my $0.25, but I doubt if it is really worth the trouble.

What is funny is that sometimes they just say they can’t transcribe it and don’t charge anything. I’m not sure why they thought they could transcribe this one.

By: Vinod

Vinod — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:26:58 +0000

I belive Vonage uses SimulScribe (http://www.simulscribe.com/) for doing the voice to test translation.

By: Alf

Alf — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:18:39 +0000

As a native Texan, I’m dying to see a follow-up where you listen to the actual voicemail and share at least some small snippets of the actual message.

By: agh3

agh3 — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:15:24 +0000

Mark,
I’ve had the same thoughts over the last couple of months. When I first signed up..it was great…but the ‘translations’ have gotten progressively worse..and this is with most “non-accent” Chicago area folks (well..no accent that I can hear ).

I sent a complaint into their support department and their response was as unintelligible as the voicemail translation I was complaining about. Still…95% of the time I can get the jist of what’s being said. I like responding from my Treo to a voicemail message to the person’s email address and they want to know how I did that.

By: Bernard Farrell

Bernard Farrell — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:12:12 +0000

That’s a strange transcription. I’d love to know some of what was actually said.

It’s amazing they can charge for this. There ought to be a money back guarantee!