I’m In Love With Spinvox
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*
that’s pretty cool. gonna set this thing up today.
Yeah- absolutely. I can’t wait to check it out. Looks absolutely brilliant, and just what I’ve been needing! Absolute annoyance, voicemail. This is sure to make that, “Hey, it’s me- call me back when you get the message” voicemail that people enjoy leaving for some horrible reason nearly tolerable.
That seems like a very cool feature! Makes me think I should give it a go
So what I’m really taking from this, is that it’s not really voicemail you hate, but the people who use it without any thought. I almost never leave voicemail unless it’s necessary… and sometimes it is. I may not necessarily need to speak with you, but I need to leave some detailed message.
I use sms when I want to communicate something fast… that is, I’m afraid a phone conversation will encourage a 5 second thing to become 10 minutes. (note 150 char limit, sms must be about something fast)
@zr - Actually, it’s also the need to dial-in, tolerate the voice prompts, and that sort of thing. It’s so inconvenient, imo. Getting an SMS is far better
Thats funny. That service is exactly like the old text pagers we used to use in the olden days before cheap cell service.
Mar 28th, 2008 at 5:05 am
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Jul 10th, 2008 at 5:00 am
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