Get Voicemail In Your Email Inbox: GotVoice

June 3rd, 2006 at 11:39 pm

I really like the idea of Spivox, just wish It would hit the US already (and with VZW)

As i look over the GotVoice site, and the service plans, the highest plan is up to 24 VM’s a day, which has me wondering does it not support more than that?

I am also skeptical about both these services on how they actually work to retrieve my voicemails..

June 4th, 2006 at 12:24 am

Many companies have been trying to solve the Voicemail “riddle” in a way that will detach the Voicemail from its Telephony perception. Let’s look at it this way - why do we leave voicemails only when we call? wouldnt you want to email a voicemail? IM a voice message? etc.

It seems like horizontal solutions (aka unified messaging services) fail to deliver the goods. Solutions like GotVoice which concentrate on an easy to comprehend use case seem to be the right solution.

One thing that does bother me though is leaving my very private voicemail credentials at the hands of a provideri don’t really know.

June 4th, 2006 at 7:15 am

I’m also thinking that the limit of VM/days is very low. I’m not sure people will pay for an unintegrated service. I personnally wait for the Google solution on voicemailing because i don’t want to go on another service to do my mailing activities.

I’m also asking myself is there is people willing to pay for that kind of service.

June 4th, 2006 at 7:36 am

Why has it taken so long for a service like this to emerge? The cell phone carriers should have been providing this service as an additional charge on your plan a long time ago. They are just missing out on my money, oh, but the cell phone carriers would add the “voicemail-to-email conversion” tax.

June 4th, 2006 at 10:20 am

It would be nice if people who cover tech had memories that extended more than a few years. This is nothing new.

Nearly every telco voicemail system deployed today has the ability to forward voice mail to email. They can also forward voice mail to phones via MMS. Some version of this has been around since voice mail (which predates the web) was invented. The carriers have just opted not to turn this on. The mobile operators could enable voice mail to MMS in a minute if they wanted to, and know how to (they don’t, they make good money off people checking their messages the usual way).

GotVoice is nothing new, I’ve seen a dozen services like it come and go over the years. I built a similar service that enabled people to send MP3 voice mails from their phones six years ago. Assuming people are willing to pay $10 to have a machine check their voicemail for them (doubtful), they’ll have a business until the carriers decide to activate mail forwarding on their Commverse systems. If you do a search through old (mid-1990s) telecom trade rags such as Computer Telephony, you’ll see that the concept of voice-email forwarding is very well traveled.

In the meantime, there is a completely free workaround. Just re-record your voice mail greeting to say “Thanks for calling. I do not check voice mail. Send me an email at ___ or text me at ___. If it is really important, call me on my mobile number.” Works great, and then nobody, whether the telco or an intermediate parasite such as GotVoice, is getting into your pocket to deliver a non-essential service.

Simple, make your callers do your transcription for you and you never have to spend a dime on band-aids like GotVoice.

June 4th, 2006 at 11:16 am

Rather than wait for GotVoice to pickup your voicemails on a schedule, you could forward unanswered calls to eVoice and get vmail in your email immediately…

June 4th, 2006 at 4:13 pm

I don’t know why on earth would I make people send me an email when they call my phone and leave a message. Every body may not have access to it and if they wanted to they would have sent me an email in the first place. I remember years ago, I went to upgrade my cell phone service so that I could have paging capability for my cell phone the precursor to text messaging now. The sales person actually told me since they did not offer the service because they felt like no one ever needed it in the first place, “Why do you want to page someone when you can just talk to them on your phone.” Well seems to me that as many as text messaging that goes around today that question is as stupid back then as it is today because you want the ability maybe. I hope that sales person is no longer in business and I hope the guy Brian above is no longer in this business, we have enough backward thinking in this business. This service should be offered for free on all phone services today.

June 4th, 2006 at 8:28 pm

Getting voicemails sent to your e-mail is the coolest aspect of this service. Other than that, though, it doesn’t really stack up to what I’m already using, which is video e-mail. Not only do you get the sound, but also the picture. I’m addicted to it as a sales and business professional.

But, this sounds like a good add-on or back up to that. I wish it had some kind of video component…once you use video in e-mail, there’s no going back. It’s amazing and has helped me so much in business I can’t even describe it.

June 4th, 2006 at 10:10 pm

Some of the major carriers do offer this service. At least, mine is Verizon, and Verizon offers a product they call “iobi Home” (http://www.verizon.com/iobihome). It allows you to route voicemails to your email inbox, plus many other features (e.g. selectively forwarding calls). It costs $8 per month ($5 if you have a qualifying Verizon plan already). I haven’t tried it, but this announcement got me curious about it.

June 5th, 2006 at 3:55 am

I used the free version of GotVoice.com last year, and although it worked without a problem, I really didn’t “need” it. Just as was previously mentioned here, my main gripe was that it removes the “new” status of your voicemail, so if you’re not checking your email regularly, you may not know you have a new message.

However, last month, I found a great use for GotVoice: I was in Sicily & on the island of Malta for a couple weeks, and, knowing my Sprint CDMA phone wouldn’t work there, I set up GotVoice to retrieve my messages. I also added a comment to my outgoing message, telling callers they should leave an email address if they want a response. I was able to listen my messages on my laptop at the hotels, hot spots, & internet cafes, and replies were as easy as an email.

Last Friday, I set up my new VOIP system at home, and was surprised to see they, too, offer the voicemail-to-email option, but they do it right; no added charge, unlimited messages, and you have the option of keeping your forwarded messages as “new” on the service’s v-mail system.
[ http://www.Voiceral.com ]

June 5th, 2006 at 6:21 am

This is in reponse to a couple of comments about the status of acquired messages being sent to archived. I am on Verizon, and that has not happened to my message. I can still hear the ones that have been retrieved as new messages. I have been using this service for 3 months and have not had any problems..

June 5th, 2006 at 10:30 am

It is nice to hear that so many of you are using the GotVoice service. We appreciate all of the comments and will take them as input for future versions. Please note that some of the comments are not accurate and, rather than respond to each individually, we recommend that people try the free service themselves and see if it is something that is useful for them. That said, we would like to clarify a few points right now:

• Our free service gives the user 3 scheduled automatic voicemail retrievals per weekday. An unlimited number of voicemails are retrieved within those 3 retrievals. So, if you have 8 new voicemails on your phone, we will pull all 8 of those for you, and you will still have 2 more scheduled retrievals left during that day. Plus you have up to 12 manual retrievals per day as well. Michael, we are checking why we only pulled 3 of your 4 voicemails. It looks like you helped us find a strange bug (which is now fixed), but we did pick up 4th voicemail on the next retrieval.
• I noticed a couple of people thought that GotVoice required a user to go to our website to access their voicemail. While a user can go to the website to check voicemail, almost all of our users have their voicemail delivered to their email, and then access it via a link to our site. The link spawns a flash player that plays your messages. Users of our Plus and Premium services have the option of having an attachment with an MP3 of their message sent to them via email. We require free service users to link because the advertisements in the emails pay our bills, and we have to be able to prove to advertisers that a user saw the ad. If anyone has any ideas on how to better accomplish this please tell us! Users of the free GotVoice service can still save their voicemails; they just have to hit the download link in their voicemail, and we allow them to save their voicemail locally.
• We plan to expand into Canada as well as overseas. It’s just a matter of resources! Any VC’s out there? With additional funding we will expand much more rapidly!
• I think a number of your users hit the nail on the head on why wireless carriers don’t want to deploy this kind of system. They make their money on minutes used. For them voicemail is a cost center, so why deploy any additional features that might cost them money? As far as call-forwarding solutions, they have their drawback; they usually cost, and the voicemail is not accessible on the phone company system. Some landline carriers offer a service similar to ours, but charge a lot for it.
• Regarding moving new voicemails to saved. We recognize this issue and are soon going to start offering to send a text message to users (if their carrier supports this) that GotVoice has moved a message. Some people find this useful, but others really don’t care, so we will make it a configurable option.
• Finally, we are working on upgrading the site! We have always tried to put the usability of the service first, and frankly our explanations of how our service works and what we offer has not quite caught up with our current slate of features. As I write this we are getting rid of the holiday message and replacing it with audio testimonials from our users.

Thanks again to you, and all of your readers, for trying our service and providing such valuable feedback.

June 5th, 2006 at 4:04 pm

1) Most of my communication with clients is with email, but sometimes it is voice mail. I can now store the voice mail with the rest of the client correspondance in one place and have it all backed up together.

2) I like the idea of being able to retrieve voice messages while overseas.

3) I like the ease of being able to forward a voice mail to multiple email addresses.

4) For Podcasters, this is another way of capturing voice comments to use on your podcast.

June 7th, 2006 at 5:36 pm

It seems to me that we are checking more and more places for messages and it is getting more and more ridiculous. Why is there not ONE place we check for all of our messages. That place could be different for any person depending on their needs, but it seems to me, making it so that we can get home and office email, cell, home and office voicemail, and dare I say fax, all on one machine, be it a PDA phone, computer, or whatever other device.

samfind
http://samfind.com

June 28th, 2006 at 3:10 am

So why not just put voicemail on your website to begin with?

The Audio Comment System from MyChingo.com offers both free and a paid membership service. The only difference is the maximum length of the incoming message.

You’ll receive an email notification of new voice mail.

You can share your voice mail with other site visitors using a single line of code that puts a flash player on your site.

The service automatically creates a RSS Feed.

There is built in text chat and voice chat.

You can moderate your own voice enabled chat room.

You can download your messages as MP3 files.

You can turn on moderation mode so that all new messages must first be approved.

http://www.mychingo.com

Michael Bailey

October 26th, 2006 at 10:12 am

I have a Treo 650 with Sprint and it says it is not compatible with the system. That seems strange since it is such a popular phone.

October 26th, 2006 at 1:05 pm

Quick reply to DROdio…GrandCentral doesn’t attach the actual file to the email for a couple of reasons, mainly to ensure that your inbox, IVR and email stay in sync. Nothing is more annoying than listening to 20 messages as attachments in your email and then having those same messages showing as new and having to listen to them again when calling into the system to check your messages. That said…if enough users want the direct file attached and understand the tradeoffs, we’re more than happy to consider making that an option for users. - Best, Craig Walker (GrandCentral)

November 26th, 2006 at 1:59 pm

They should really let you check your cell voicemail and text meassages on your email. Then you wouldn’t have to pay to check your messages with minutes. And you can reply to a text message free from your email. And this service should be free. Come on lets have at least one thing for free in life.

December 27th, 2006 at 7:21 am

Voip does all this and more for free!

SunRocket allows you to view and sort voicemail messages online using the Member Account Manager.

You can receive notification of new messages by phone, email, pager, text message, or Instant Messaging (AOL IM, Yahoo IM, MSN IM or ICQ).

And when you want to listen to them, you can do so using any computer with Internet access.

Look for even more features coming to Voip in 2007.