Review: Spinvox
I’ve only spent a little quality time with Spinvox but the product is straight forward enough that I feel ok reviewing it. The short answer is, this is my holy grail of voicemail. It is a great, great product - if you have the ability to get email on your phone it is incredibly worth it or if you don’t mind the expense of getting an SMS per VM it’s definitely something to consider. I just got word from the customer service that up to 15,000 US customers will get 1 year free. Seriously, I don’t know why you’re still reading this review, you should already be signing up.
Basically it works like this, by hook or by crook you get your phone forwarding voicemail to a number that Spinvox sends you - I had to call T-Mobile to figure out how to do this for my handset and configured this for my Vonage line on its website. Then everytime a call goes to voicemail Spinvox converts the message into text then emails and/or SMS’s it to you. Just like that. For me, this is better than the impending random access voicemail that the iPhone promises, because you can read it - which I prefer because it is way more useful and convenient than listening. If you’ve ever received a long rambling voicemail with something important in the middle, or a telephone number you had to transcribe you’ll know what I mean. Now it’s all down in text and in your email - archive, forward, reply or copy and paste away.
The translation itself is significantly better than I expected. It does it’s best at translating, if it feels it made a guess it adds a little (?) after the words and if it really can’t figure it out it just punts and adds __. In my limited experience it happens extremely infrequently. If you need to get to the actual voicemail, never fear, you simply call your VM number and you can access that message directly (random access style) with the two number code Spinvox sent you at the bottom of the email. Seriously, it’s that good.
Just to see what would happen, I called myself up and recited the second and third stanzas of The Jabberwocky (I skipped the first, because I wanted to give Spinvox a fighting chance). Here’s what it came back with:
Beware the Jabber wok, my son the jaws that bite the claws that catch, beware the Jib Jib bird & shun the frumious(?) bandiest snatch. He took his verbal sword & hair long tied the mangsome foe he fought, so the rest of he by the tum tum tree, he stood a while & thought
I didn’t read it slow and didn’t take time to enunciate, if anything I read it kind of fast. That’s pretty great rendition. It also was able to interpret my wife’s message (who speaks with a mild Colombian accent) w/out any difficulty at all (although it did interpret the little spanish she said, “Donde estas?” as “On the stuff”, which also seems like a pretty good phonetic approximation). If you want to test this yourself without signing up (I didn’t notice this till after I signed up), there’s a “test drive spinvox here” link at the bottom of their homepage that gives you a number to call and the screen in the middle of the page gives the results.
There’s really not much downside, perhaps the biggest issue is that the time from leaving a message to getting the email can really vary, in my test the longest time it took was 15 minutes, I think about 5 minutes seemed to be average. I’m not sure how I’ll feel about this in real life - making the test call and waiting and checking your email probably makes that time span feel longer whereas in real life if you haven’t picked up the phone chances are it’ll be more than 15 minutes before you’d check your VM. I don’t know, your position on this may be different than mine, but for me, that’s a minor issue.
The other thing is that they’re in England, I assume, and things get done during business hours there. This has a few side effects, it was actually a little hard to sign up for the free trial. I tried the online form and it wouldn’t let me, so I sent an email - they replied after a bit and said that was something of a bug and I should just reply to them with the information (nothing overly sensitive). The next day I got an email saying I was ready to go with some instructions, but sadly those instructions didn’t work. So, impatient to get things rolling (I really wanted this service) I had to call their number and the guy said that I had been inadvertently sent UK instructions and he was resending US ones, which he did and lo, they worked.
So at long last I was finally set up, it was a few calls to T-Mobile to figure out all the details of call forwarding and how long before calls were forwarded (as a side note - the T-Mobile customer service people were surprisingly excellent). That worked out, quick fix on the Vonage website and now I’ve got everything going to my Spinvox voice box. The only wrinkle and it’s my Treo’s fault, I believe, is that if I get a call and hit the ignore button, the forwarding doesn’t kick in and it goes to T-Mob’s voicemail. Again a minor issue.
Lastly their website is kind of difficult to figure out. It took me a long time to find pricing and to actually figure it all out (and that picture of the lady with the logo overlays is strangely freaking me out). I also wish some things were more controllable via the web (such as setting up SMS messaging). But again, no big deal. Their voicemail system is good and easy to use. It does, slightly annoyingly, add a little Spinvox message after it plays my message to people, but it’s pretty minimal.
It also has some other features that make use of the voice-to-text translation, like taking notes and blogging - I don’t particularly feel the need to use them, but the voice-to-text is the killer feature so I can imagine exactly how those work and so if you’re into that sort of thing, you might want to check those out, too.
If you hate VM and you hate having to pick up your voicemail and sit through the messages and copy down information, this could be the product you’re waiting for. If you travel internationally a lot and are annoyed at the charges levied on you to pick up your VM then this may be the product for you. I recommend you give it a whirl, stick through the quirks of signing up and give it a try, with a free year, you really have nothing to lose.
