07.25.07
Am I crazy? Voice Mail Delivered to Your Inbox – Build it Yourself for Free!
It used to be that I actually dialed the phone to retrieve voice mail. That’s no longer the case at home and I plan on either subscribing to a solution to enable this functionality at work or (better yet) building a solution myself – keep reading.
At home, I use Vonage, which is great in many respects. As new voicemail arrives it appears as a .wav file in my email inbox and a simple click lets me listen and delete. Two clicks vs. a familiar and ridiculous string of numbers, access codes and passwords to retrieve over the phone. No brainer – especially when I’m on the road.
At work, this is not the case since we still rely on tradition services for phone & voice mail. I’m aware that a number of free and fee-based services are surfacing to help alleviate the pain and provide voice mail delivery through email and even better yet voice-to-text services. Some of these include YouMail, SimulScribe, Spinvox, GotVoice, and CallWave. Simulscribe and Spinvox both specialize in voice-to-text conversion, while GotVoice & CallWave
are more about recording a wav file and serving up a web interface to listen, categorize and even send .wav based voice mail files.
This got me thinking. What do I really want and need out of a voicemail system and is it something I could cobble together myself?
1) I don’t want to call my voice mail to retrieve messages – ever again.
2) I don’t really need my voice mail converted to text since I’m online (either Mac or PC) at least 10 hours a day.
3) I want all my voice mail in one place – this means 3 phones lines with one place to check voice mail.
4) I don’t need to reply to anyone’s voice mail by phone. In my case, email and text is much more effective and efficient
Of course, the above scenario won’t work for everyone, but it might get you thinking about what’s important to you.
Here’s my plan (just in idea phase but aiming to implement immediately):
Option 1 (and my best bet) - My Vonage setup is already working as needed for my home phone. One down, two to go. If you don’t have Vonage, definitely check out YouMail which is
I’ll write a quick script to open this folder 4 times a day and launch some media player (e.g., iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc) to play my voice mail. So, instead of checking 3 voicemail boxes throughout the day, I get a regularly scheduled delivery to my desktop ready to play. Sure, my personal and professional voice mail will get mashed up, but honestly this doesn’t bother me. Oooh sounds good and very doable with minimal effort.
Option 2 – So say you don’t have Vonage or some other system currently in place you can leverage to deliver at least some portion of your voice mail to email. I think the solution here is potentially within reach as well. This is a work in progress that that leverages all the free tools available on the web to create my dream system - for free. It can be done.
Here are my initial thoughts on the subject…using old technology in new ways
1) First of all, I have an old laptop and PC in my closet collecting dust – who doesn’t? If you don’t, simply visit your local United Way and pick one up for $25 bucks – make sure it has a phone port, reformat the hard drive and install an older free version of Windows. You’ll also need the ability to send email – even if it’s dial-up who cares. This system is automated so there’s no user and speed is not an issue – cool!
2) Next install some free software to make outbound phone calls and a simple .wav recording program that can record the phone input as source (several of these exist – search on download.com).
3) The phone software needs the ability to make regularly scheduled outbound calls. Set up an autodial scheme to call your voice mail (e.g., 555-555-5555, pause pause 1#, 1234# … you get the idea). The next string of dial commands will vary greatly depending on your voice mailbox settings but you want the dialer to enter the appropriate sequence to do three things: play the first new message, delete this message, and then hang up.
4) Meanwhile, the recording program needs to kick in, record the message, and save it as a unique audio file. – ooh, this is getting tricky. Some platforms, such as the new iMac provide terrific tools to automate program launch features and commands. For example, I could launch Garage Band, record audio, save as abcxyz1, abcxyz2, etc, attach to email and send. Older programs will require pretty sophisticated programming, but this can be done through a combination of simple batch (.bat) files and executables.
5) Next, repeat steps 3 and 4 to purge the voice mail. Maybe repeat 5 times if you average 3-5 voicemails every 6 hours. It doesn’t really matter. The secret is to do a test run when you voicemail box is empty so that you understand the resulting size of the audio file. Later, when it’s time to sort and deliver the wav files, we can ignore those that are below a minimum size threshold since we are confident they are empty.
6) That should take about 10 minutes. Now launch your email program, create a new email for each file, attach the files and send to your designated address. Huh? Again, some simple mix of programming tasks can accomplish this and it’s not as tough as you may think. Well, let’s hope so.
I’m off now to set up Option 1 and start exploring Option 2 … check back in a few days for an update.
Amy said,
July 25, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Look into grandcentral.com it was bought by google. It is INVITE only you can get an invite thru inviteshare.com anyway it integrates all the phones and voicemail goes into an inbox. I just got it yesterday and am still playing with it, the features are pretty cool I cnat explain so… research it
Admin said,
July 30, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Grand Central looks like a pretty cool solution. I reserved a number today and look forward to trying it once once available. Thanks for the suggestion.
By the way, my Vonage setup is working really well. I get all 3 three phones forwarded to one voice mail box and I limit to checking a few times a day. An email notification is also sent to my inbox if someone leaves a message. Great time saver.
Nick said,
August 1, 2007 at 1:51 am
Check into youmail, they’re still in beta so it’s free. I got it the other day, it redirects voicemails to an online log that even lets you undelete old messages.
Admin said,
August 1, 2007 at 8:56 am
YouMail does look pretty good - and yes it’s free. One cool feature is that you can block a user (think Spam) so that they cannot leave a message. I like that.
Looks like this could work as a nice alternative to the Vonage example I originally had above. I’m going to update my post to include Nick’s recommendation.
Thanks!
Nick said,
August 3, 2007 at 2:58 pm
I think they call that feature ditchmail, and yes it’s useful for blocking spam… and messing with friends…