The reason this is so important, especially in the US is because the US mobile telephone carriers are shortening and reducing the amount of space available for voicemails without notifying customers.  Despite the fact that storage space is cheaper than it ever has, they refuse to either extend the storage time and space for voicemails, even for a monthly fee.  I see this as a lazy CIO trying to squeezesome extra dough out of his budget and pissing
on the clients in the process.

If I could get Voicemail to text, it would allow me to save the voicemails on my phone regardless of the space on the server.  I can increase the memory in
my phone and transfer text messages to email if necessary already.  This would just alleviate the ongoing manufactured "space" issue in the US servers.

&*^&%^%$#$^& I hate american cell carriers.

Brian W
Owner
CAD Computing

On 08:52:11 22 October 2004 textor wrote:

Spinvox have come up with this natty idea.  It reads your voice mail does a quick speech recognition job and sends you the voicemail as a text mesage on your mobile.

You couldn't make it up!  This is such a potty idea on so many levels. Even if it reliably works (which I couldn't try because their trial signup seems to be broken) why on earth would someone pay 25p per message for this? 

Voice mail is like email. The purpose of it is to hold messages until you have time to deal with them.  SMS is like Instant Messaging - it's for more urgent shorter messages.   People use the medium that suits the message.  Why don't we all have our emails translated into IM or SMS? (even if we could junk the junk mail) Technically easy, but email is the right medium for email messages.

Voice is voice - the words are only a fraction of the message.  Leave out the intonation and a simple jest could become a serious insult.  A missed or mis-recognised word could negate the meaning of a message. 

Expensive, risky and not even adding value.  I will pass on this one.

Bob
Textor