YouMail Visual Voicemail
Posted by Jay Donovan on 06/19/08 in General, SMS, Voice Mail
I saw a link about this over at smartphonethoughts.com but there wasn’t much info about how it really worked, so I decided to run a few tests of my own.
YouMail is a visual voicemail service. What that means is that once you set up an account, you have web access to your voicemail and you get extra, advanced voice mail options, with their service.
I have to admit, messing with the voicemail system already set up on my phone made me a little nervous. The last thing I wanted to do was goof that up and start missing messages. Thankfully, so far, they seem to be coming in just fine.
YouMail claimed that the set up would only take 2 minutes, and I think they were right. It was an easy account set up, and then they give you the specific phone code to enter (for your phone model) and I think what it does is sets forwarding on your messages to go to their system and not your provider’s system. In the help file there is info about how to cancel your account and restore your old voice mail routing.
Once messages are routed to their system, you have lots of options:
Listen to messages online, set up sms alerts for when you get calls, set up mp3 greetings. Neat.
The coolest feature to me so far though is their transcription beta. It transcodes voicemail messages and delivers them as text messages, so you can get the idea about your message, without calling voicemail. That seems very useful to me. It doesn’t always nail it exactly, but close enough. Hey, it’s still beta. Anyway, I am usually patient about those kinds of things and try to have a pragmatic outlook. You buy that?
Also, you can access all the web features at m.youmail.com. Lots of options.
Best part about the whole thing… IT"S FREE! FREE I TELL YOU!
I know there are other services out there that do this (our office has Exchange email alerts for voice mail), but for your average consumer, so far, this service seems great to me.
I will follow up in a week and let you all know how it holds up.
Written by Jay Donovan · Filed Under General, SMS, Voice Mail
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I’d be interested to see how this works out long-term. I tried out a third-party vm solution for my phone and it was a disaster - it would take at least 10 minutes to learn that a new vm was waiting. If this is better, that might work out well for me.
So far this works pretty good…Lots of extra features and so far it has taken about the same time to receive notification of a new voicemail as standard at&t voicemail service.
I signed up for it and have gotten 2 voicemails. So far, the transcription is about 85% accurate. This looks like its going to be very useful - especially if you can’t always answer your phone on a bus/subway/meeting.
a few questions: 1) what languages does the transcription service support? 2) can one route more than one phone number to the same mail-box? 3) are there limits around message storage?
one thing i can imagine doing is calling myself up to leave messages that i would like to get transcribed… like voice-notes, but with a free transcription service.
I have used this product for a year now and I have been very pleased. I also have at&t and messages come to my inbox just as fast as the voicemails I used to receive directly on my phone.
One of the reasons I really like this product is because it sends you a wave file for each voicemail. You can then simply save the email if you want to keep a record of the voicemail.
Per your question above… I will try to find out the answers for you. Will post it back here.
Ciao,
Jay
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“a few questions: 1) what languages does the transcription service support? 2) can one route more than one phone number to the same mail-box? 3) are there limits around message storage?”
Heard back from YouMail… Here are the answers to your questions:
1) the transcription currently is only available in English.
2) yes, you can route more than one phone number to the same mailbox. look at the My Settings tab within YouMail.
3) currently, the message storage limit is 600 voicemails.
@Jay - Thanks! Sounds like a cool tool.