Stop Listening to Voicemail: Read It!

It was until recently that I realized how much I prefer text to all other forms of media. And this is coming from Mr. New Media Podcaster Guy. Seriously, give me text any day of the week. It’s easier to understand. It’s quicker to digest. It’s also the quietest form of communication, lending itself nicely to my prison time at work.

The latest company putting text first is PhoneTag.   They’ll automatically transcribe your voicemail into text and send it to your e-mail or mobile device.The company, formerly known as Simulscribe (you might remember them from their “Voicemail Sucks” advertising campaign), will work with 95% of U.S. voicemail systems, including big boys like AT &T, Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint, Skype, GrandCentral, etc.

PhoneTag provides unlimited voicemail box storage and proclaims a healthy 95-percent transcription accuracy rate.

You can try PhoneTag for one week for free. Pay options include:

Unlimited messages = $29.95 a month
40 messages = $9.95 a month
A la carte = $.35 per message

The service is useful if you often find yourself sitting in a meeting wondering who just left you a voicemail. But a stronger purpose might be that you can archive and delete voicemail like e-mail, giving your voicemail a paper trail, so to speak. For this reason, and the fact it can be a ‘time saver,’ the service has become quite popular amongst businesses (custom integration required).

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.