Time is money.  When communicating costs me a lot of time, I tend not to do it, regardless of the consequences.  Of all the communication methods we have in today's high tech society, the one I loathe the most is voice mail.  How many of you reading this have left me a voice mail and never heard back for weeks if ever?  Ok, don't all write me at the same time, this server can only handle so much load...

Think about it, how long does it take to retrieve a voice mail?  First you often have to dial a 10 digit number, wait 5-7 seconds for it to ring, go through ridiculously slow voice prompts and hit a series of digits to actually listen to it.  If you're lucky, the person spoke slowly and clearly enough for you to write down their phone number, that is if you have a pen and a piece of paper handy.  I don't have two minutes to get a single voice mail.

Anyway, I often figured that if it was really important enough, the person would just call me back or send me an e-mail.  Don't feel bad though, I'm far worse at work.  When I left my last company, I listened to my voice mail on the last day and found stuff from our Oracle rep 9 months prior.  So I don't like voice mail but I didn't want to inconvenience my friends and family to force them to send me an e-mail so I had to think of a different way.  The different way found me.

A company called Simulscribe has delivered a life changing product that transcribes your voice mail into text and e-mails to whatever address you prefer.  It can also send them via SMS.  Getting voice mail in this way has seven distinct advantages:

1) You can read message transcripts in a fraction of the time you’d spend listening to them and easily delete them with just a half second scan.

2) You now have random access to your messages. You will never again have to sit through five chit-chatty messages, unaware that Message 6 is a time-critical bit of urgency from your boss, your girlfriend or Lauren Graham who won't take no for an answer.

3) You don’t have to take notes as you listen, writing down people’s names and numbers. The notes have already been taken for you.  Poor penmanship or audio quality won't result in a wrong number to an adult dating service.

4) Text is indexable, searchable, sortable, copyable, pastable, printable and forwardable. What an awesome thing, to have a Find command for your entire backlog of voice messages. Want to pull up that message about the billion dollar deposit into your brokerage account? Just hit Find in your e-mail program, type “billion,” and do what you need to with it.

5) You can check your messages even if you’re deaf — or temporarily so, because you’re on a downtown street, at the mall or at a Michael Bolton concert (ok, if you're there, you have more serious problems than listening to your voice mail).

6) SimulScribe lets you save the momentous messages of your life — the marriage proposal (a voice mail proposal- how romantic!, the “she wants to have your baby” call, the “we'd like to offer you substantially more money” call — in a super handy audio archive of your life. That’s because each SimulScribe e-mail message arrives with an audio-file attachment. Its primary purpose is to provide you with a backup, to check against the transcription. You'll quickly discover how nice it is to be able to save that file separately for future reference, just the way you might save important e-mail.

7) If a voice mail transcript arrives on your Windows Mobile Smartphone or Blackberry, you can call the person back just by tapping on the phone number with your stylus where it appears in the message (super handy).

Simulscribe is available now (with a one week free trial) for $10 a month for 40 transcriptions with each additional message billed at 25 cents.  This can become very expensive for those who get a lot of voicemail but the company plans to offer better deals for frequent voice mail receivers — including an unlimited plan but there were no details on those plans as I wrote this post.

I highly recommend trying it out if you hate voicemail as much as I do. And go ahead and leave me a message, I'll get back to you. Seriously, I will. No really. I promise.

 
A sample Simulscribe transcription in my e-mail