Listening to Voicemail messages can be a pain. Some people simply aren’t good at leaving voicemail messages, and so it can be a chore to listen to them bumble and stutter their way through recording a message for you.
Additionally, voicemail is the most inefficient way of receiving a message. If you’re in a meeting and send a call to Voicemail, you can’t quickly glance at the message to see if it’s urgent as you could with an e-mail or SMS – you have to stop the meeting to listen to the voicemail.
Therefore, one of the most useful tools I’ve been using over the past couple of years has been the function to turn any incoming Mobile ‘Phone Voicemails into SMS text messages and e-mail.
If you’re an iPhone user, you have Visual Voicemail – but this service is not supported on all networks in the UK.
If you’re a Google Voice user in the US, you’ll be familiar with Voicemail transcription – but for us here in the UK, where Google Voice is not currently available, an alternative service is VoxSciences.
VoxSciences offer a Voice recognition technology that I’ve found to be really effective. The service works through you changing your mobile phone settings so that instead of re-directing your missed calls to your Network Carriers voicemail, you forward those calls to a geographic (01642) number provided by VoxSciences.
Callers leave you a voicemail, as usual, and shortly afterwards both you and the caller receive an SMS with a transcribed copy of the message. You’ll also receive an e-mail with a transcribed copy of the message, as well as a link to listen to the original voicemail.
If you’re not convinced, try it yourself – from your mobile phone (in the UK) ring 0203 111 22 00 and leave a message. VoxSciences will transcribe the message and send it to you as an SMS.
VoxSciences also provides a web interface so you can listen to old Voicemails and see an audit trail of who left you messages and when.
The service costs £5.00 a month, or 30 SMS messages – whichever is sooner, and VoxSciences offer a 7 day free trial.
I’ve not found another Voice-to-Text service in the UK as good as VoxSciences – but if you know of one, please feel free to let me know about it!
Richard Tubb is one of the best-known experts within the global IT Managed Service Provider (MSP) community. He launched and sold his own MSP business before creating a leading MSP media and consultancy practice. Richard helps IT business owner’s take back control by freeing up their time and building a business that can run without them. He’s the author of the book “The IT Business Owner’s Survival Guide” and writer of the award-winning blog www.tubblog.co.uk
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2 thoughts on How to convert Voicemails to Text for UK Mobile Phone users
PAUL LLOYD
6TH MARCH 2012 18:24:34
I used to use Spinvox who offered this service and found it remarkably useful until they were sold off and stopped individual accounts. Interested to see if this as a good. I have been without for a year now and still miss the service every day, i am sick of listerning to messages 4 and 5 times to get a phone number !!
RICHARD TUBB
8TH MARCH 2012 08:49:33
Paul - I originally went looking for SpinVox myself, but then stumbled across VoxSciences when I found SpinVox was no longer available. I've found VoxSciences has paid for itself in the time saved reading rambling voicemails alone! :-)