A slight precursor for this post, I should let you know that I’ve not had voicemail setup on my personal cellphone for several months. I *hate* voicemail. It’s such a terrible ‘service’. Someone calls me, and I don’t pickup. First, I’ve got a record of their call in my cellphone’s call log. I don’t turn my phone off – ever, so it’s there as a missed call. I can see that John called, for instance, at 8:55pm on Thursday. With voicemail, John is now going to leave me a voicemail that usually goes something like this, “Hey, it’s John, it’s Thursday night, just calling to see what you were upto, call me back.” Any new information? Not really.
Not only that, but the most ANNOYING part of voicemail is that I now have this little icon on my cellphone’s display that I have to call in and navigate the voice prompts to get rid of. How amazingly inconvenient. Thus, I completely turned it off. For about 6 months, when you called my cellphone, if I didn’t answer, AT&T would kindly let you know that you couldn’t leave a message because I didn’t set it up. People adapted to this rather quickly, and would just send an SMS if it was important.
Enter Spinvox. Now when someone calls, if I don’t pick up, they get a pretty standard greeting (yes, I recorded it), followed by a quick blurb that Spinvox will convert it to text. They leave their message, and a few minutes later, I get an SMS that looks like the screenshot above (number shortened on purpose). FREAKIN BRILLIANT. People can now leave me a message which I can receive in a format that is convenient to ME. If I’m in a meeting or on a conference call or something, I can still have access to my messages, and act upon them.
Setup is amazingly easy. I have a local number from Spinvox that acts as my voicemail number. On my N95, I went into Settings – Phone – Call Forwarding. From there, I set it so that if I’m not available or don’t answer the call, it should forward the call to my new Spinvox voicemail number. No need to call AT&T, it was all done within 3 minutes on my phone. I did have to email Spinvox to add SMS, as messages are only delivered to your email by default. However, it only took 10 minutes on a late Friday afternoon to get a response that my SMS delivery was all setup. Total setup time: 15 minutes.
Note that you still have access to the original voice recording by calling in to your Spinvox voicemail number. They’re not gone forever.
Brilliant. I’ll be testing it more over the next few weeks, but if you’re looking for a way to avoid the nonsense of dialing in to get your voicemail, you should definitely check into Spinvox’s voicemail service. There’s even a free 7-day trial, just in case you hate it (though I doubt you will).
*Disclaimer – I was setup with a free account for testing purposes*
