Don't necessarily want to labour this KISS thing but...
I was chatting tonight to Stuart Godfree of mkodo tonight at the UKTI Mission reception at the British Consulate here and we got onto the subject of SpinVox. It occured to me that it's a fantastic example of a mobile service that has embraced KISS in spades.
It's so simple to use, you just have to be able to talk into a phone to leave a message and receive a text to get the message. Everyone can use it. Perfect.
Hats off to them.
As you know, I'm a SpinVox user and generally love the service, albeit with some reservations as I've posted about before.
Ewan at SMSTextNews met with them recently and is planning a series of posts as a result. The first one prompted some interesting comments. Check out the third one.
SMS Text News meets Spinvox - intro
Now I appreciate it's anonymous but in an industry you get to hear things and this comment corroborates those things. If true it does put some serious question marks over the scalability of their offering.
I'm interested because I've looked at speech recognition technology in a previous life, several times, and it always came up short. Too much training, too specific to a given user and even then not really usable. I was impressed that SpinVox seemed to have cracked it.
I'll be following this one closely.
Maybe I was naive but I didn't consider that I would be charged for forwarding calls to the SpinVox voicemail system. Found this on their site after noticing the calls on my bill: http://www.spinvox.com/support_spin_my_vmail_pricing.html
Divert charges may be used by Carriers when you are diverting your calls to your Spin-my-Vmail voicemail number. Normally, these charges will come out of your inclusive minutes, if applicable to your tariff. If these charges are not being deducted from your bundled minutes, you should contact your Carrier to find out why.
Still a great service but you pay your operator for using it as well SpinVox for getting the messages.
SpinVox have confirmed that there have been 2-3 occasions when the message delay leaving their systems has exceeded 5 minutes. Given the quantity of voice mails I have received then that is probably reasonable, although not desirable. I wonder if the problem is more around expectation.
I'm on Vodafone and if anyone has used their voice mail system, they'll know it's nothing if not insistent. Before I enabled SMS message alerting from Vodafone it's insistent, repetitive calls to me whenever someone left a message was extremely irritating. You daren't bounce the call because you know it's going to be calling you back in 5 minutes demanding that you LISTEN TO THE MESSAGE.
Look sunshine someone's gone to all that trouble to leave you a message, you can jolly well listen to it right now and see what they wanted.
The text message alerts to call in, made life bearable. The real benefit was when you just missed a call. The message arrival was the signal that the other person that called had left their message and you could just call them straight back.
We used to be with Orange and they have the fantastic call waiting facility so you could callback straight away. The other person would be alerted that you we're trying to call and would hang up on the voice mail system and speak to you.
With Vodafone you just get their voicemail because they're tied up leaving you a voicemail, infuriating.
Now with SpinVox, I find myself waiting for the message to come because it's my signal that they've called but now it can tell me what they've said without me calling into the voicemail. The problem is that this adds time, 3-5 mins, between them putting the phone down and me receiving the message. When you're used to seconds, 3-5 mins feels like an eternity.
Now I know I'm comparing apples and pears. All Vodafone is doing is sending me a dumb SMS message telling me to call the voicemail service. SpinVox on the other hand gives me some really valuable information in that SMS message.
Patience is never something I've had in abundance but I guess there are very few voice mails that can't wait 3-5 mins. Good things come and all that.
I blogged recently, SpinVox, I love it but, about the highs and occasional lows of using the SpinVox voicemail to text service. Well the guys at SpinVox are obviously perusing the blogosphere and decided to drop me a line.
Hi Adam, thanks for writing about SpinVox. I'm sorry to hear about the occasional delays you've been experiencing and I'd naturally like to look into this - as this is not the norm for SpinVox customers. Our average time delay is 3-5mins - so there must be something else affecting this?
If you can give me some more information on the messages that have been delayed, it would really help us look into this.
spinx@spinvox.com
So I've sent an example and will keep you posted.
It must be said that there haven't been any noticeable delays since I blogged. All messages have been delivered within the thresholds quoted.
I use the SpinVox voicemail to text service and am a big fan, most of the time.
For those of you who don't know, you set the SpinVox service has your voice mail service. Once it receives messages, it sends a transcription of the voice mail as an SMS or email. No calling your voice mail and navigating through IVR systems. You've also got a written record of the message, perfect if you need to do something in response to the message.
There just two problems. Firstly, when I have to call the voice mail system to listen to a message they weren't able to transcribe (it happens), it hits you like a brick wall, suddenly you're back in IVR hell. Not sure whether this is the delta between the simplicity and beauty of the text compared to IVR; or that I've never learned to use the IVR system because I so rarely have to.
Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly, are the delays in receiving messages. Sometimes it can take an hour or two for messages to come through. Now I hear of deals with the mobile operators to provide the SpinVox service to their customers. If they can't scale up from where they are now, what's it going to be like when those subscriber bases start signing up for it.
I do really love the service, but the delays are infuriating and do take the shine of what is in essence a great service.
