Voicemail to text applications – the good, the bad.
There are a lot of voicemail applications out on the market, most with useful features sets or something that just plain rocks. While reading around online this morning I stumbled across the website BizOrigin – The Art & Science of Startups. They have an article posted today that lists a few voicemail applications, descriptions of each, along with the strong points and weaknesses.
I try to keep up with these applications since I can’t seem to find anything worthwhile that fits my needs. I generally wind up with an application that doesn’t translate the voice mail to text very well and leaves me struggling to figure out what the call was about – CallWave is the worst from my experience. For example, I had a voicemail that translated the text saying, “bet no about a hunch.” Now I’m thinking, what the hell?? So I return the phone call and ask just that. Come to find out, the person left the voicemail actually saying, “lets go out to lunch.”
For those of you looking for the voice to text mail applications or just looking for something new to try, check out the list on BizOrigin.
Yeah, CallWave vTxt Gist can be a little wonky. I’ve found that the vTxt Gist (their speech to text thing) doesn’t cope well with background noise or people who tend to mumble or talk really fast. I’ve had a few people leave me messages that got translated perfectly though, so the technology is pretty cool. Combined with the SMS notification, you can determine from the vTxt Gist whether you even need to call your voice mail to see what the message is about .. useful if you’re in roaming or some place you can’t call from.