YouMail: How about a voice mail secretary?
How would you like to have your own secretary for taking and delivering voice messages? It sure beats slogging through your phone's voice mail menu, especially if you're short on time or if you want to quickly refer to a saved message.
YouMail's new transcription service, launched from beta on Thursday, adds a (premium) human touch to its otherwise free "visual voice mail" service. In addition to receiving automated transcriptions of cell phone voice messages online, YouMail users can now pay for real people to transcribe their messages and send the gist through SMS or e-mail.
Human intervention boosts the transcription accuracy to 95 percent, estimates YouMail CEO Alex Quilici. That's compared with an estimated 75 percent to 95 percent accuracy of automated transcription, a rate that varies due to factors like voice clarity, idiom use, and call quality.
YouMail is offering its human transcription service in four tiers, two of which are aimed at people with smartphones and the other two for owners of standard phones. Prices range from $3.99 per month for YouMail to text you the meat of 50 messages, all the way up to $17.99 for unlimited transcriptions sent over e-mail.
There's also a freebie that lets YouMail users have the messages from one contact auto-transcribed to text, or to have the first five calls per month from any caller converted to text. All transcriptions will also be available from your YouMail in-box online.
This move offers direct competition to voice-to-text services like VoiceCloud, which also charges a monthly fee to have people--instead of computers--type up your voice mails.
Related stories:
YouMail puts voice messages on the mobile screen
Voice-to-text services seek a human touch
Jessica Dolcourt reviews the latest and greatest smartphone apps, in addition to a healthy dose of Windows software. E-mail Jessica and follow her on Twitter. 
but - SkyTel used to offer live secretary & transcription services in the 1990s (1993-1995 it was helpful when there were no incubators for start-ups but relatively cool 800 numbers instead - this was before most folks even had e-mail accounts)
the pricing seems too high compared with the pricing of SkyTel ! i bet plenty of twitter-folk would do this for less using VoIP ...
It allows you to import our contacts, and and set up groups, and assign different voicemail messages to a group to each person, or even each of their phone numbers. If you don't have a list to import, you can set up You can even change the message to someone on the fly, so you can kind of leave them a voicemal on your voicemail, in case you can't get to them for some reason, but know you won't be able to answer the phone next time they call.
They even have social networking features (I don't use them, so I can't say anything about them). I don't mean to sound like I am advertising for them, but I love it, and it allows me to really customize my voicemail experience, one way for friends, another for customers, and a separate one for strangers. It even offers what they call a "ditch mail" feature, which allows you to refuse calls, and not even take a message for specific numbers, or even blocked numbers.
All in all 2 thumbs up for You mail!
Also the title of this post is misleading - this is not a live secretary service. A live secretary is a human who answers the phone and takes a message. This is an automated service taking a message and relaying it to a human.
- by mailbreak November 12, 2008 8:58 AM PST
- I have been using MessageSling.com for several months and find it does a better job.
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