Skype offers SpinVox voice to text messaging - finally

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 March 2009 03:55

Business IT - Technology

SpinVox, the company whose technology underpins Telstra's Voice2Text messaging service, has made its voicemail to text conversion services available to all Skype voicemail users, 18 months  after announcing plans to do so.

The service has been a long time coming. Plans for it were reported by iTWire in August 2007.

"Skype is the first Internet communications software provider to deploy SpinVox, further reinforcing our position as the only provider of voice to text messaging services which are used daily by millions of people on five continents," says SpinVox co-founder and CEO, Christina Domecq. She added: "Our user base has grown over twenty-fold in the last 12 months and bringing Skype's voicemail subscribers on board will accelerate this trend."

SpinVox converts voice messages to text in English, Spanish, French and German. The messages are then sent by Skype as an SMS message directly to a designated mobile phone or at no charge as an email for users to read. Individual voice messages can extend over three SMS messages, each of which is limited to 160 characters. The Telstra service, made available to consumers last month, also has a three-SMS-per-voice message limit.

Recipients of converted voicemail messages can still listen to the full voice message by either signing into Skype or by calling their Skype To Go number. With this service (available presently in Australia, Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, UK, and the US) users dial a PSTN number from any phone and then on-dial the number they want to call, via Skype.

Skype users can set up voicemail to text from their account page, by simply registering a mobile phone number. Each voicemail to text conversion will cost €0.20 ($A0.39) plus the cost of sending an SMS at standard Skype rates. There is are additional conversion and SMS charges for each SMS in a multi-SMS voice message, up to three in total. Users have a choice to set a limit on the number of voicemail conversions received per day and to receive messages from people only in their contact list. An email notification will be sent if that limit is exceeded. All payments are made through Skype Credit.

The SpinVox is now offered by Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, SaskTel, Rogers Wireless, Telus, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa, Vodafone Spain, Movistar Chile, Skype and Livejournal. But individuals can use the service directly via www.spinvox.com. You can watch a video review of the Cincinnati Bell offering here.

SpinVox claims that the key to its technology is its "ground-breaking Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS) which works by combining state-of-the-art speech technologies with a live-learning language process." It operates in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian.