Voicemail To Email Conversion? Sort Of

Are you waiting for a phone call but left your cell phone at home? Maybe you’re sitting at an Internet cafe and want to check your home voice mail. GotVoice lets you do this with two new voice services. One service calls your voice mail and generates an email to let you know you have messages. You can do this for your cell phone or home phone. The other service actually records your voice mails to their system and emails you MP3 files with the recordings. [via IP Inferno]

As Ted Shelton, who is testing GotVoice, points out in his IP Inferno article, why don’t phone companies offer this themselves? I agree, but I’m not big on this idea in general. It seems a rather unnecessary service. Also, do you want a third party having your voicemail PIN access numbers? Because that’s what they require to provide their service.

I can’t see this service catching on, unless it comes directly from a customer’s cellular provider. Just my opinion, but I think it’s just more digital clutter. Why not make sure you have your phone with you before you leave the house in the morning? And if you’re using VoIP on a mobile phone, you wouldn’t need the service anyway. Sure, there may be some instances where it comes in handy, but I can’t imagine being so desperate to check my voicemail that I’d need email to let me know.

These services from GotVoice are different than speech-to-text conversion of voicemail to email, which actually seems to have a valid purpose, such as access for the hearing-impaired.