Alltel offers Voice2TXT voicemail transcription
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Dec 17th 2007 10:02AM
posted Dec 17th 2007 10:02AM
Powered by SpinVox, Alltel has become the first national US carrier to offer a service capable of transcribing voicemails and sending them to subscribers as text messages. Dubbed Voice2TXT, the feature is offered in plans starting at $4.99 a month for 20 conversions all the way up to $19.99 for 100 conversions (what, no unlimited plan?) with texts sent by the system not counting against users' text messaging allowances. Signing up for the service apparently requires that folks reset their voicemail systems and re-record their greeting, and after that, you theoretically never need to listen to a recorded message again. Alltel's targeting the feature at people that frequently find themselves in meetings and can't take a call, but we have to ask: since you don't need to speak when you're listening to your voicemail, isn't staring at your phone and pressing keys every bit as annoying to those around you as holding the phone to your face?
or....use callwave for free
Reading texts is a magnitude less intrusive than listening to vms.
lol man I would blow that 100 msg limit in less than a week!! I get 10-15 vm messages PER DAY!!! No way is this feasible for business!!! Nice try though!
Isnt that what allot of people thought "visual voicemail" would be? :) Kudos to Alltel for beating the big guys to the punch!
works really well. Although sometimes it will get a couple of words wrong.
I've been part of the SpinVox beta trial for the last 10 months, averaging around 10 converted voicemails per day. It is tremendously helpful when sitting in a meeting--you can't answer the call and you don't want to be rude and hold the phone up to your ear to listen to voicemail, but you can steal a quick read of your e-mail without interrupting things. Are the transcriptions perfect? No, but they're 90% accurate and that's good enough. (They have some trouble with names and proper nouns. It's pretty obvious the transcriptionists are not North American. And yes, these are transcripts generated by people, not speech reco software.)
I consider this an essential business app--I can't imagine working without it.