If you’ve been reading Symbian-Guru for long, you should be no stranger to Spinvox. They offer a handful of speech-to-text services, including blogging, personal notes, social network status updates, and, obviously, voicemail. Their transcription is tough to beat, and believe me, my friends try. However, today I wanted to let you know about another similar service, called YouMail.
YouMail is focused specifically on replacing your voicemail. Today they’ve announced a few new plans, as well as the addition of a human-assisted transcription service, which should work to make the transcriptions even more accurate. While I’m still a huge fan of Spinvox, I’m also *extremely* impressed with the level of customization and control that YouMail gives you over your voicemail system.
For starters, YouMail has two main features that really put it a step ahead as a killer voicemail-replacement service: Personal Greetings, and Ditchmail. Personal Greetings allows you to give, well, a personalised greeting to each of your callers, easily and with tons of options. You can import your contacts from a number of webmail services, or simply upload a .CSV file from Outlook or other. Now you can either give each contact his/her own greeting, or you can create groups. Unfortunately, there is no ‘syncing’ ability, though that would definitely be a cool addition.
For these greetings, you can either have the YouMail SmartGreeting system start with their name, ‘Hello <Sarah>, Ricky isn’t available right now, leave a message and I’ll make sure he gets it’ or you can record a custom greeting from your computer. A third, and FAR more fun option, is to explore through YouMail’s community, where others have uploaded their own custom greetings. Some of these are very professional, as its obvious that businesspeople use the system, while others are….not so professional. There’s literally hundreds to choose from, and they’re free to use, which is awesome.
Ditchmail, though, is what I find to be the best feature yet – it’s like network-based call filtering, really. First of all, with YouMail, you can send unknown callers to a specific message, such as one informing them that you don’t accept calls from an unknown number, etc. However, if you have an ex-girlfriend, credit collector, etc, that keeps nagging you and calling incessantly, you can use YouMail to convince them that you’ve changed your number! Simply add their number to your Ditchmail list, and when they call, they’ll be sent to a special message (again, you can customize this, or use a pre-recorded one), and after the recording, it simply disconnects – never giving them the chance to even record a message! Brilliant!
In addition to this, you can choose to get your voicemails either via SMS or email, or both. In the message, you can even opt in to get more details on the message, such as the time and date of the call, even the network and geographic location of the caller (based on the area code). Very cool, indeed. With email, you can also choose whether the original recording is attached to the email, either as an MP3 or a WAV file.
YouMail also has a mobile site setup, m.youmail.com, which provides a sort of visual voicemail opportunity. Messages are shown as small icons, and you can click on the one you want to listen to, regardless of where it is in the chronological order of messages. It’s light on features, but it’s a start.
Today, YouMail unveiled its new human-assisted transcription services, which should work hand-in-hand with the automated transcription service that’s currently in place. You can still use YouMail for free, but only for a single contact, such as your significant other, or your boss. The monthly plans are as follows:
- $3.99 Read-It Text: High-quality transcription sent as a single SMS. Designed for users without smart phones to quickly decide what a voicemail is about and whether or not to retrieve it. This option provides 50 transcribed messages per month.
- $6.99 Read-It Select: High-quality transcription delivered as an email. Designed for users with smart phones to avoid dialing your voicemail to receive messages. This option provides 50 transcribed messages per month.
- $9.99 Read-It Text Unlimited: High-quality transcription that fits in a single SMS. Designed for users without smart phones who receive a lot of voicemail. This option provides unlimited transcribed SMS messages per month.
- $17.99 Read-It Select Unlimited: High-quality transcription delivered as an email. Designed for users with smart phones who receive a lot of voicemail. This option provides unlimited transcribed e-mail messages per month.
I was able to chat with CEO Alex Quilici earlier this week, and was told that 95% of users will fall under the 50-transcription-per-month plans. The difference in the two is essentially the option of getting your messages delivered as a single (possibly truncated) SMS, or as multiple-SMS (in the case of longer messages), as well as email.
All in all, I’m rather impressed with the level of customization and options that YouMail offers. Being able to filter out unwanted callers is something that I can definitely see value in, and the ability to easily offer each of my contacts (or, if I’m lazy, only a handful of the more frequent callers) their own personalized greeting is rather neat, too.
Of course, while Spinvox doesn’t offer near the level of control on the voicemail side, they do have a leg-up on other speech-to-text services, such as personal ‘note to self’ messages, updating your various social networks, and even blogging. YouMail is currently limited to the United States, though plans to expand are underway. Spinvox, on the other hand, is currently available in a dozen or so countries, including the U.S.
As someone who had actually disabled voicemail for several months, I’m 100% sold on the idea of having someone else transcribe voice messages and deliver them as readable text. I can list countless situations where it has really made the difference, and I’ll never go back to listening to voicemail again. Both Spinvox and YouMail have advantages and disadvantages against each other, but I would encourage you, if you hate voicemail, try one of them out.
You can setup YouMail here, or you can check out Spinvox here.
