I'm Simply Smitten with SpinVox

 I had the supreme pleasure of meeting James Whatley of SpinVox recently in Spain. He's a tremendous chap, and what's more, he's championing the word of a terrific service. He's turned me on to SpinVox which I've been using it for about a little over a week now- and I'm hooked.

  If you're not familiar with SpinVox- first off, you really should be- basically what you've got is a number that you forward your calls to from your phone. On my N95 I have it set up to intercept any call that goes unanswered, is declined or just doesn't reach me. When the call is forwarded to your SpinVox number, a voice prompt directs the caller to leave a message much as your regular voicemail would do. The standard greeting is of course customizable, so that when the call is transparently shuttled along to SpinVox, it seems just as though your carrier's voicemail service has answered the call. Right after that, you receive the contents of your caller's voice message as text on your mobile. Absolutely brilliant!

Read on to see how I've applied this and how it's saved my hide once already...

I abhor voicemail. I hate to pull out my cell, dial up voicemail, wait through the prompts until the message begins to play only to hear the standard "Hey, it's (whoever)- gimme a call when you get this message" then beat my head into the surface of whatever is nearest. I would love to explain to people that there's no need to leave such a message- as we're living in the age of caller ID, if I've seen you've called, I will return when I can- there's no need to put me through the misery of calling in to check a message. The problem is that even though my N95 generally gets brilliant reception- AT&T's signal at my home is complete rubbish. So I've recently been instructing callers on my voicemail to leave a message no matter what, if they would like their call returned. This of course has proven, as you would assume, to greatly increase the amount of "Hey, gimme a call back bro" messages- and I was about to reach the limits  of my nerves until SpinVox came into my life and saved me from the madness and head bashing. Now all of my messages come as text. For whatever reason I simply can't convince my circle of friends and family at home the usefulness of text, so SpinVox has really made things a great deal easier. What's more, the SMS is shown as sent by the originating caller- so I can just fire off a text reply if I just need to say something quick and not make a call. 

Another nice feature that's saved me already is email. You get a copy of the text sent to both your mobile and your existing email. A couple days after I set up SpinVox my wife called from work asking me to do something before she got home. Like the good husband I am, after I got the message the first time- I completely forgot all about it. Luckily for me the message was also sent along to my Gmail- I spotted it just in time to save the day. Honey, if you're reading- thank SpinVox. SpinVox, if you're reading this, thank you. :)

I recently heard another story of a mate who had unfortunately left his cell behind one day, and nearly missed an important birthday- his mum I believe! Well, a call from a sister saved the day when he saw the reminder in his email. A tight spot avoided, again with thanks to SpinVox.

I plan on enjoying many more of these "saved" moments now that I'm using SpinVox to convert my voicemail to text- but this isn't all that SpinVox does for you. SpinVox captures any spoken message and converts it to text for delivery to where you need- your own inbox, your blog, or facebook other whatever space you've got. Really, what they do is turn voice into text, give us the power to speak freely and apply this to the many ways that we communicate. If you're not enjoying the pleasure of SpinVox right now- pop over there and get started with your free trial - I can nearly guarantee you that you'll not regret it and will never go back to calling in for your messages.

There's also a really slick short video with SpinVox's Tony Robinson on the software involved in the speech recognition behind the service that's just been posted at the BBC's tech page. The video also show the brilliance of the system when encountering an unknown word. It's just under two minutes and well worth a quick watch. 

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written by Adam Shoes, March 15, 2008

To use for a business aspect this is awesome, I don't know why people who travel for work wouldn't use this.

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Transcription beyond voicemail
written by Ahmed Bouzid, March 24, 2008

Yes -- lots of value indeed! I use SimulScribe, which is a similar service, and at my Job with Angel.com we have partnered with SS to link up the technology to Salesforce.com CRM. So, for instance, you can all a toll free number and leave a note to yourself that gets trancribed; or you can call in and speak a note that gets emailed (after transcription); or people can call in and leave a ticket, etc. See: http://www.salesbyfone.com/

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