GotVoice, will travel

      Sitting at a public computer in the lobby of a hotel in the old city in Vilnius, Lithuania, I listened  to phone messages forwarded to me from my office phone and cell phone. I was able to keep up with goings on at home--without making an international long-distance call.
    I received the messages through GotVoice.com, a VocieMail forwarding and transcription service.
    I've tried a couple similar services for cell phones. GotVoice's does cell phones, but it also has cracked the code for digitizing VMs on office PBXs. Important messages don't just come over cell phones, so the addition of the PBX service is significant.
    Sorry, but GotVoice steers clear of home answering machines.
    I had some problems setting up the MP3 player for GotVocie on Verizon's BlackBerry World Edition. But once, I got it going, I was listening to my messages on the phone. Before that, I went to GotVoice.com to listen in on the messages.
    GotVoice launched a transcription service.in September.
    As a person who tends not to listen to entire VMs, it's helpful to get the transcriptions so I quickly can see the gist of calls and pick up names and numbers.
    As with its transcription rivals, GotVoice is less than perfect. There is a wide range of accuracy in GotVoice's transcriptions.Some are dead-on and others miss the mark. Another problem is that it can takes hours for the transcripts to be completed. The company blames the delays on the popularity of the service.
    GotVoice allows you to answer your messages in several ways. You can record responses on a computer or a phone. You can type out a text message and have it transformed to speech and sent to a VM or e-mail box. You can send out messages--with sound effects like a babbling brook--to a VM without ringing the recipient's phone and disturbing him while he's asleep or in a meeting (or both).
    The $10-a-month premium plan allows the subscriber to hook up three phones and is ad-free and includes transcriptions. There is a free "lite" plan that can be associated with two phones and does not include transcriptions but does include ads
    GotVoice also offers visual VM, a la Apple's iPhone, but for any cell phone.

Comments

[Andy]

Howard, thanks for the mention. You may also be interested in a Facebook Group we started called "Cool Apps for Mobile Phones." - Andy