Simulscribe
I discovered a neat service today. Simulscribe intercepts your voicemail, converts the messages to text, and delivers them to you as email or a text message. If you know me, you know how much I hate listening to voice mails, but how frequently I check email. So I’m trying the service.
Simulscribe is a direct competitor to Spinvox, which is the darling of Guy Kawasaki, (who may have met Kevin Bacon). I am trialing Simulscribe because it is cheaper than SpinVox and US-based. (Spinvox allegedly had a problem with Sprint PCS, but that may have been resolved by now.)
Want to help me try it out or ask me how it’s going? Dial my Simulscribe number (817) 717-stix-won-five-stix* and leave me a message.
* (number spelled (incorrectly) to prevent phonespam bots)
March 17th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
UPDATE:
The system *appeared* to stop working tonight, but it turned out to be a SprintPCS issue that took a record breaking 2 hours to diagnose. I’m too frustrated to go into the agonizing customer service timeline – so here are the important points for any SprintPCS folks who might want to try this:
* To redirect voice mails to another number, I am supposed to be able to dial “*73[ten digit number].” This does not really work on my phone (because it’s a Treo?) and must be turned on by calling customer support.
* When a SprintPCS phone is using wireless web, the above system doesn’t apply. If you want it to work in that circumstance, you have to enable busy call forwarding (ordinarily activated by “*74[ten digit number]” – but doesn’t work on my phone). Note that turning this on means you’ll lose call waiting!
* Most importantly, realize that the expensive part of this set up is Sprint’s per-minute charge to forward calls. ANGER.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Yeesh. I’m not much for voicemail either, (I like words! Written down! At least for things I have to remember to do. ) but I am still using an answering machine (the shame!), so I’m not sure that this technology is for me .:)
Hang in there,
A
March 28th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Thanks, Brian for noting this link from NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7599119&sc=emaf