Voicemail-to-text coming to Telstra

Stephen Withers
Monday, 19 November 2007 06:04

Your IT - Home IT

Having voicemails forwarded as text sounds like a useful idea. Just as it is sometimes more convenient to have emails read aloud to you over the phone, there are times when it is more discreet to read voice messages rather than listening to them.

Telstra is about to launch its Voice2Text service that does just that. Powered by SpinVox, the service will be available to business, government and enterprise customers from the end of November. It might be extended to consumers in 2008.

"Telstra is the first in Australia to offer this type of speech conversion service and our customer trials have shown great levels of conversion quality and effectiveness," said Telstra's executive director of wireless and mobility products, Roberto Vannini.

Similar services are already offered by European and North American carriers, and by Skype. But as iTWire's Stuart Corner pointed out, it comes at a cost. Even at Skype's relatively low rate of $A0.11 per SMS, the fact that each SMS can only contain 160 characters means the bill can climb quickly.

So how much is Telstra charging? There's an ad-hoc rate of $A0.55 per message, with the option of paying $A10 for 25 messages or $20 for 80 messages. That's only around half the cost of using a human-operated SMS paging service. We would expect an automated system to be offered at much lower rates - around one-tenth (say $A0.10) seems about right.

SpinVox also offers services allowing users to post LiveJournal, Facebook, Jaiku or Twitter updates by voice.