Jag put me onto Spinvox. I love it, although I understand it hasn’t been a hit. Carphone Warhouse just took a 17% stake and I guess that might have been a rescue operation. I pay £5.00 per month for the service and I’d pay more because I find that standing on a railway station platform in a howling gale trying to take down a phone number from a voicemail message on the edge of a damp newspaper with a broken biro is no fun at all.
The way it works, you switch to Spinvox for voicemail and they intercept your mobile voicemail, transcribe it and send it back to you as a text message. The resulting text apparently comes from the original phone number, which is handy and makes replying very easy. Spinvox‘s… er… spin is that they somehow automagically translate your voice messages into text. Of course, they’re doing nothing of the sort. Nice people in a call centre in the West of Ireland are typing them up for you.
Once your callers know this, it influences what they say in their messages: my wife, for instance, doesn’t swear quite as much as she used to when she calls. This is a good thing. Some people, on the other hand, swear a lot more and one friend never misses an opportunity to malign the Irish when he leaves a message (you know who you are!).