MostlyGeek

Rogers recently started offering a new voicemail to text message service. This should be interesting for people who receive a lot of voice mail. It is trendy, geeky but expensive. The rub is that it is a $15.00/month service on top of already inflated cell phone prices.

Alltel recently deployed the same service, also powered by SpinVox, but on more graduated pricing. Their service starts at $5.00/month.

Even with my paltry 5 or 6 voice mails per month I would love to use this service. Listening to voice messages is too time consuming which makes it annoying.

There are so many advantages of getting an SMS message instead of a voice mail:

1. It is less interrupting. In a meeting you can still pretend to be listening (less rude) versus actually taking the call.
2. I don’t have to listen to somebody talking.
3. I can save it for later reference. This is also possible with voice mails delivered as an email attachment. Which I love.
4. It can be indexed for search.
5. It saves me time. I can read a lot faster than most people can talk.
6. I don’t need to call into a voice mail box to retrieve my messages. My voice mail at work has like 300 messages in it. I never call in. It’s just too annoying.
7. I can determine how important a message is without having to listen to the whole thing. This is my hot button. Where do I sign?
8. You can scan backwards. Most voice mails systems do not have a seek functionality. In case you missed the name at the beginning, the message in the middle or the phone number at the end.
9. Text is smaller (data wise).
10. Voice mail is so 90’s.

For me there is no downside to this technology. If only Rogers was reasonable in its pricing. Fifteen dollars per month is a lot of money to pay. Especially when cell phone bills are already averaging around $40.00 to $60.00/month.