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Never Listen to Voicemail via Cell Phone Again — Callwave.com & Spinvox Deliver Voicemail to Email for Free

by Tom Johnson on Feb 22, 2007
categories: technical-writing web-design

Callwave.com is a pretty cool service. When people leave voicemail messages on your cell phone, rather than having to listen to the messages on your phone, Callwave sends the voice message to your email inbox. The following image shows a sample delivery of the message. You click Open and the message plays.

callwave

Setting up Callwave (which is free) took me all of 2 minutes. You just enter a string of digits in your phone, and voila. To sign up, see the callwave.com site. I learned about Callwave from this podcast with Matt Mullenweg. He was really raving about it.

Spinvox is a more exciting service. It actually transcribes the voice message to text, and apparently does so accurately. I'm still waiting for my Spinvox account to get set up. If you email [email protected], you can get a free one-year account (it's a UK-based service that is doing a trial in the U.S.). I learned about this service from David Pogue's podcast.

I have a geeky reason to use Spinvox. I listen to podcasts while driving, and I often want to transcribe a cool quote I hear during the podcast. Of course it's problematic to transcribe quotes while driving, so I'm hoping I can call my phone and record the part of the podcast I want transcribed. We'll see if that works.

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

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