Eureka Moments

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As with any SMS, if you handset supports it, the caller’s number is a live link so you can get right back to them, and you can listen to the original message if necessary.

You may need to do this, as SpinVox uses computerised engines to translate voice into text, but in my experience it shouldn’t be needed very often. I’ve made several deliberately garbled and mumbled calls to myself, with poor pronunciation, using phrases like ‘gonna’ instead of going to and incorporating jargon terms. I’ve also had calls from people with odd accents – a French native speaking English for example. Apart from the jargon terms SpinVox has coped admirably. It inserts a blank space whenever it fails to translate something, and every SMS has a numeric code so you can get to the original voice message easily enough.

It is quick too – typically I am finding just a couple of minutes waiting time between voice call being made and the SMS arriving.

Having voice messages converted to emails and sent to my desktop instead of – or as well as – having them converted to SMS is really cooking with gas, because now I can forward messages to other people, and I have an instant archive.

It is important that you can tweak the service to suit your own needs. I can log into my account on the Web and turn conversion on and off at will, or choose to have conversion just between the hours of 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday. If conversion is turned off, SpinVox sends me a text telling me there is a new voicemail.

Of course, SpinVox isn’t free, though you can sign up for a week’s trial (with a maximum of 50 messages). There are various tariffs, ranging from £5 a month for 20 conversions up to £40 a month for 210 messages. That means at the cheapest monthly rate you are paying 25p for each message converted, while at the most expensive you are paying 19p. It’s a lot of cash when you add it up, and if you overstep your conversion limit, messages cost a whopping 30p each.

I’m sold on the idea, though, and very impressed with the quality of the conversion to text that SpinVox achieves, as well as with the speed with which it manages this. It isn’t exactly a low-cost service, but then again, if your business - or indeed your social life - revolves around your mobile phone, it might be worth a look. For me, that old eureka magic has kicked in once again.

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