Managing Voicemail With GotVoice
Michael Arrington
14 comments »
When I first reviewed GotVoice in June 2005, I thought it was an awesome, if rough-around-the-edges, application. Gotvoice’s goal is to bring sanity to your voicemail inbox, and it does that well. Tonight they are relaunching with a much cooler interface and a whole bunch of new functionality.
Previously GotVoice was a simple service that used your voicemail credentials and turned each voicemail into a MP3 file. Got Voice would then send out an email with a link to your GotVoice inbox. It basically allowed users to move voicemail administration from their phone to their computer.
The new features take that basic service several steps forward. First, two phones can now be associated with an account. Also, you can now compose voicemails via a flash recorder in the service (or via your phone), and deliver it to the voicemail of people in your contact list. This is great for responding to messages, or to broadcast a new message to one or more people.
Another useful feature of Gotvoice - since it has access to your phone admin via your credentials, you can also use it to change your voicemail greeting. They’ve created a tool that mixes your voice with any MP3 you care to upload. Once you’ve created the greeting, GotVoice will turn it into your voicemail greeting.
Finally, the coolest new feature. GotVoice will be launching a stripped down WAP version of the voicemail inbox page for access from a mobile browser. The result is a visual voicemail product that is sure to be the rage as soon as the iPhone launches with it’s own visual voicemail. This page can be accessed from the browser, and GotVoice is working to do deals with carriers in the U.S. to offer this directly as well.
What GotVoice isn’t doing yet is converting voicemails to text, something that they say they’re working on via a partnership. Jott and Spinvox do this now, and it is a bit of a hole in GotVoice’s offering. I look forward to the feature being added soon.
GotVoice has a free and premium ($9.95/month) version of the product. The company raised $3 million from Ignition Partners, Second Avenue Partners and Cedar Grove Investments in October 2005.
It is a good service and the quality of the recording is good.
What really makes this stand out is the clear quality of the TEXT to SPEECH option and the ability to add background audio or MP3 to a recorded message
Hi, can you fix your script error on the main page? Just becacuse Firefox doesn’t put it in your face, doesn’t mean it is not there.
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Source File: http://www.techcrunch.com/
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Now that’s something worth trying. I’ll see how it does, thanks.
Sounds like an excellent product. They might consider changing the title of their homepage to something other than “Untitled Document” though. Just an aesthetic opinion.
I was waiting a long time for this. I think this is going to be a blow for the new iPhone visual voice mail.
http://www.privatephone.com
I think GrandCentral has GotVoice beat - what say you?
http://www.grandcentral.com/
John,
I was going to mention that it appears they’re going “head-to-head” with Grand Central. In fact, their UI seems to be slightly inspired by GC. The reality, however, is that this space is large enough for several “players”.
I like the service. I wish they could check my voicemail more often than every 30 minutes. I even paid for an upgraded account and still couldn’t do that. Grrr. 30 minutes is way to long to be notified about a voicemail.
Their Terms of Use document [PDF] includes the instructions “FOR INFORMATION REGARDING THE GOTVOICE .COM PRIVACY STATEMENT CLICK HERE.” but there is no link provided … ‘HERE’ is plain (acrobat) text.
I’ve been using GotVoice’s free service (which I love) for the last couple of years and all I can say is it’s about time they updated their ui; the new on is sweeeet! I think Grand Central should be a little nervous though because unlike them GotVoice doesn’t make you adapt another phone number. Talk about a hassle.