Alltel Wireless is an up-and-coming carrier in the United States, and brings a really cool announcement this morning. They’ve hooked up with Spinvox to bring speech-to-text technology to their voicemail system. The new service, Voice2TXT, is available today to all Alltel subscribers, and is compatible with any phone capable of receiving an SMS.
Voice2TXT uses Spinvox’s technology to automatically convert any voicemail messages into an SMS, which arrives in the user’s inbox. This makes it much easier to manage voicemail by eliminating the need to dial in and navigate the various voice prompts just to get your voicemail. Voice2TXT also eliminates the hassle of replaying voicemail messages over and over just to be able to write down important information.
The service is priced monthly, with different buckets of conversions. For $4.99/month, you get 20 conversions, while $9.99 gets 50 conversions and $19.99 will convert up to 100 voicemails for you. Overages are billed on a per-conversion basis and vary depending on which monthly package you have.
I’ve used Spinvox in the past to blog, as well as to provide live coverage to readers recently when I was at Nokia World 2007. The translation technology is top notch, and while it has difficulties occasionally, it’s really stellar for voicemail, and the team is constantly updating the dictionary to make sure things go smoothly.
**In doing some research for this post, I went to Alltel’s site and noticed that there isn’t anything on the front page regarding Voice2TXT. To find any information, I had to guess-click on “Axcess Services”, and then “Messaging”, which brought me to a messy page with a bunch of tabs, one of which is “Voice2TXT”. If anyone from Alltel is reading, wouldn’t you want to advertise such a cool new service right there on the homepage?