I hate voicemail. The problem is that once I have a single voicemail in my box, I no longer get notified when new messages arrive. Also, I have to listen to them from oldest to newest to get the message from the call I just missed. Also, it takes a lot of effort to ignore a voicemail. (Hint: if you want to leave me a message, use SMS).
That is why I am glad to see SimulScribe providing “visual voicemail” for the rest of us. Apparently they just launched a massive advertising campaign in NYC proclaiming Voicemail Sucks.
I plan to sign up for a free trial later today. I will report back on how I like it.
On a related note, I think the technical idea behind this service is great. Any time you can insert your service as a man-in-the-middle of “content” delivery, you can do really neat things. Statzen does the man-in-the-middle thing for non-web delivery channels. Likewise, news readers have opportunities to make RSS feeds much more useful by being a man in the middle (a good example is the stuff Nick Bradbury is doing with attention in FeedDemon). It doesn’t matter what medium the “content” is in; video, voice, and text all work. SimulScribe is a medium translation service for those of us that find more utility in reading than we do in listening.
Another thing at play here is that there are clear advantages to text over audio. You can skim, search, and cut/paste text which is difficult to do with spoken word. I think that is the primary reason podcasting doesn’t really take off. Voicemail and Podcasting require much more commitment than reading an email or a blog post. I think that extra commitment adds noise to the communication process.
Has anyone created a podcast -> text translation service? It would likely require human transcription since the reader would need to know who said what, but it would add utility to podcasts that I otherwise tend to ignore.
