I liked the idea of SpinVox when I first heard about it. The company takes your inbound voice messages and converts them simultaneously to text messages sent instantly to your phone and email sent immediately to your computer. It also archives a copy of the actual recorded message that you can listen to by calling your voicemail just like in the days when that was what you HAD to do to get your messages.

Like I said, I liked the idea of SpinVox when I heard about it but now, having used the service for about 3 weeks, I’m not sure I could live without it. Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration but truthfully, this system is so far superior to traditional “call to hear ‘em” messages that it is an improvement roughly comparable to the difference between a corded and cordless phone in your home. Bigger, even.

The problem with conventional voicemail is that you have no real idea what the call you missed was about until you do that which you hadn’t wanted to do when the phone was ringing - interrupt what you were doing and pick up the receiver. Granted, calling voicemail isn’t the same as actually making yourself available to the person on the other end of the line but you might as well have. If the message is important, you’re going to have to call them back anyway, and if it’s not - well - it still resulted in you doing something other than what you had been doing when the phone rang.

From my perspective what SpinVox is really about is putting the control back in the hands of the person receiving the call. Instead of being at the beck and call (literally) of anyone with your number you can let the calls you don’t want (or can’t answer for whatever reason) ring through to the SpinVox service confident in the knowledge that if what the caller has to say is sufficiently important that they choose to leave a message, you’ll be getting that message as a text within moments - preventing you from having to do anything more than steal a quick glance at your phone to view the message and determine what course of action you wish to take.

Having every message archived as an email is another nice touch, saving you from having to listen to a dozen saved messages on your phone just to get someone’s number. Another nice touch is that each message is given a unique message ID number. Entering this number at the prompt when listening to your messages over the phone (the old-busted way) allows you to skip directly to the message you are interested in without having to listen to all the other stacked up detritus that tends to clog conventional voice mail boxes as we use them as a substitute for a good secretary, good note taking skills, a good memory or a combination of all three.

This second innovation is one of those “a-ha why didn’t I think of that?” ideas that is completely logical once you hear it but which took more than a decade and a certain kind of genius to make a reality. In my humble opinion this elegant solution is far superior to Steve Jobs new “Visual Voicemail” if only for the reason that it doesn’t require that you have access to a dedicated interface to take advantage of the feature. So long as you know your voicemail number (or can remember to hit the asterisk at the beginning of the outbound message after dialing your own phone number) you can access this indexed voice mail from any phone at any time. Not bad, huh?

When I tell people about SpinVox the first thing that they ask me about is how reliably it translates what people say to text messages. My answer is that it does a job that by all accounts is surprisingly good. Far better than what you’ve experienced if you’ve tried to use voice recognition software on your computer at home. In fact, so far I’ve only had two messages that weren’t perfectly translated and the mistakes were as follows: I have a friend from the Netherlands named Wibe. (Pronounced something like: veehbeh) Spinvox interpreted this as Weaver. Not bad. B”Oliver, it’s Arkady” became Oliver ___ in North City… of course if you heard this fellow speak you’d probably find it nearly impossible to understand him yourself. So again, I don’t think this is too bad.

In comparison, I met with some folks the other day that were using a competitive product that I won’t name since I haven’t reviewed it myself. One of them showed me a message he had just received that said:
“Tim. I get this, get this, this ??? it ??? get that.” Now, maybe this was a joke. Maybe his dog was calling him? Maybe someone with Wernicke’s Aphasia? Or maybe the system isn’t so good. I do know that he asked if I could hook him up with a SpinVox account so it is safe to assume that from what he saw SpinVox is superior to the competitor in his opinion. While I can’t say that I know this first hand, I tend to believe it is true. What I can say for certain is that they can have my SpinVox service back when they pry the handset from my cold, dead hand. (yes. it’s that good.)

DISCLOSURE: I liked SpinVox so much that I approached the company and am now helping them with some product strategy and evangelism in Silicon Valley.

EXTRA: As a result of this evangelistic role I can dole out the occasional freebie SpinVox account so here’s what I am going to do. If you’d like to try SpinVox for free, let me know why you’re deserving of the service in a comment on this post. I’ll hand out up to five free accounts to the comments that I determine in my sole opinion are those that seem most deserving of an account. (Mind you this is done at my discretion and my discretion alone so no whining, my decisions are final)