I recently wrote about how Unified Communication is starting to become a reality and how voice mail is inadvertently being delivered more often via email. There is yet another technology piece to the puzzle that will make UC more attractive to the end user.

Voicemail transcription – the ability to automatically convert voice mails to text and deliver the message via email is a new service that is catching on quickly. There are currently two companies that I am aware of that offer this service, UK based SpinVox and Simulscribe of NY.

I have been using Simulscribe for a number of months now and quickly adapted to the convenience of scanning through my voice mails on my laptop or cell phone email client. It all started when our company installed a new VoIP telephone system that allowed me to forward my voice mails as email wav attachments. While convenient, there was one problem - my cell phone email service removes all attachments from the emails before sending them to the phone. Also listening to messages (especially the many unsolicited ones) on my PC was a chore, since none of the current mainstream email clients have any integrated voice features at this point. Which means that you have to launch an external media player instead of simply pushing a play button right in the client.

That’s when I discovered Simulscribe. The setup was straightforward. I just changed my phone to send voice mails to their service. They transcribe and email me the text of the message, plus the wav file to any number of email addresses I specify. The results are pretty impressive. Here is an example of a recently transcribed message. I didn’t make any changes other than removing the name and phone number:

“Good afternoon, Stefan. My name is Jennifer and I’m calling today from the [company name removed] calling to invite you to join us for our complementary executive briefing we’re holding at the end of June on the 27th. The small formal consists of CEOs, presidentially to subsales only and the small group will talk about the challenges that they face with business related to sales and then you all have a follow-up discussion around alternative approaches and (??) to bring back to the work place to improve current, you know, problematic areas. This will be a next small opportunity for you to network with your peers. When you are available, please give me a call back here, [phone number removed] and I’d be more than happy to give you complete details. Thank you. Bye-bye.”

Yes, some messages are a little garbled, especially if the call came from a bad cell connection. In most cases though, I am able to quickly identify the context of the call and the caller name or phone number. My cell phone even highlights any phone number found in the message, which I can just click to call. No more scrambling for pen and paper when listening to messages and it literally takes me less than five seconds to decide which ones to delete.

Just like the early proliferation of public IM services into the enterprise, I would not be surprised to see this quickly make its way into corporate messaging systems long before the platform vendors make this part of their core solutions. While no doubt convenient and a boost to worker productivity, there are some ramifications:

• First, there are possible security concerns of routing corporate voice mails through a third party for transcription.
• Second, transcriptions sent via corporate email now fall under the same regulatory compliance rules such as archiving and consequently any e-discovery in case of litigation while traditional voice mails would most likely be ignored due the cost and difficulty of retrieval.

Corporate IT departments should carefully monitor these activities and pro-actively devise a corporate policy before any widespread adoption occurs.

Technorati Tags: unified communication, voice mail, voice mail transcription, simulscribe, spinvox

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