Visual Voicemail, Part 1 Indiana

Apple's iPhone made headlines last summer for many reasons, one of which was its Visual Voicemail feature. The concept is beautifully simple: Your voice mails are presented in a list, like e-mail. It's a wonder Visual Voicemail isn't available on every e-mail enabled cell phone.

Actually, that's starting to happen, as several companies now offer some variation of Visual Voicemail. Recently, I tested Visual Voicemail and related features offered by two different services, GotVoice and Vonage. GotVoice is a voice messaging service designed to supplement your existing cell phone or landline phone services. Vonage, by comparison, is a Voice over IP service provider.

This week, I'll review GotVoice. Next week: Vonage.

GotVoice is available as a free service, with ads; Premium ($10/monthly), which offers more features; and Business (various plans, such as $50/monthly for five phones), which adds even more options. I tested the GotVoice Premium service for more than a month.

Unlike Apple's Visual Voicemail, GotVoice retrieves new voice-mail messages from multiple phones, such as your mobile, home, and office numbers. After signing up for the service, you give GotVoice the phone number and pass code for each voice mailbox that you want it to retrieve messages from. The GotVoice service "dials into" each voice mailbox, retrieves your new messages, records them as MP3 files, and forwards the MP3s as e-mail attachments to your chosen e-mail address. (The free GotVoice service doesn't forward voice mail messages as MP3 file attachments. You have to go to GotVoice.com to view and play your voice mail messages.) You can then choose which voice mails to listen to, like Apple's Visual Voicemail, instead of having to listen to each new message in sequence, as most voice-mail systems require.

You can also log into GotVoice.com and listen to your messages from within your Web browser, either on your computer on your Web-enabled smart phone. You can choose to have messages GotVoice retrieves left in your voice mailbox or automatically deleted.

The free GotVoice service automatically retrieves your messages three times a day, but the Premium and Business services automatically grab your messages every 30 minutes. Subscribers of AT&T, Verizon, and other cell-phone service providers can have unanswered calls forwarded to GotVoice, according to Bob Lloyd of the company's customer support services, thus eliminating the need to wait every 30 minutes for GotVoice to retrieve your messages. Each forwarded call will eat into your voice plan minutes, however. (I didn't test this feature.)

GotVoice has plenty to recommend it. I love the ability to have one service retrieve messages from all my voice mailboxes. And all three GotVoice services offer some features that aren't unique but are certainly convenient. For example, you can simultaneously broadcast a voice message to multiple phone numbers--an easy way to, say, quickly spread the word about a suddenly cancelled meeting.

GotVoice Premium and Business also provide transcriptions of voice-mail messages. Your caller's voice-mail message is transcribed into text, which is inserted into the body of the e-mail or SMS text alert that notifies you of each new voice mail. This can save you a lot of time, because you can quickly scan a message instead of having to listen to it. In my tests, GotVoice did a good job transcribing voice mail messages but wasn't as accurate as Vonage's Visual Voicemail transcription service.

In addition to forwarding messages as MP3 files, GotVoice Premium and Business include a cool Podcast feature that lets you automatically download the MP3 files into Apple iTunes. You can then sync those messages with your iPod and listen to them.

I also picked up GotVoice e-mail alerts on my Palm Treo 755p. Unfortunately, the MP3 file attachments played back through the smart phone's speaker instead of its built-in earpiece. To listen to a message in privacy, I needed to have my earbuds handy, which I don't always remember to carry. I could read the transcribed text of the message in e-mail, of course, which helps minimize this inconvenience. I could also dial into my voice mailbox and listen to the message, which I sometimes did.