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Do you actually enjoy listening to your voicemails? Unless I have a missed call from an attractive female, I usually don’t. The problem, as I see it, is that people just don’t know how to leave a voice message. I’ll either get no information, or way, way, way too much info. So I’ve been searching for solutions.

Last week, we looked at GotVoice, a service that converts your voicemails to a text message and an email. Today, I’ll take a peek at SpinVox, a company that has been making a splash in the industry. I caught up with them at CTIA, and then again at WES. And I have to say that I’m impressed with what they bring to the table.

Transcribing my voicemails

Like their competitor GotVoice, SpinVox’s main function is to transcribe incoming voicemails and send them via SMS and email. After you set up your SpinVox voicemail box — a separate phone number provided by the company — they basically take over your inbox. You can record a new greeting, which is followed by a message from the lovely-sounding British attendant. As one would expect, messages are then transcribed and sent to you.

The registration process couldn’t be easier — it’s actually quite easier than GotVoice’s system, which requires a website login. With SpinVox, all you do is dial *71 plus your 10-digit voicemail number (the one provided by SpinVox). That’s it. You can call your voicemail to change your options, including your greeting, right from your phone. If you don’t want to, there is really no need to use the website.

Transcriptions are provided by D2, which is described as “a combination of artificial intelligence, voice recognition and natural linguistics.” For the most part, I found the transcriptions accurate. Having my girlfriend test it out, it had trouble transcribing “Baby,” — it said “Dede,” capitalized like a proper name. However, it transcribed it correctly on the next test. It wasn’t able to transcribe the word “schism,” however, a word I use often for voice to text testing. GotVoice was able to handle this word.

Sending the transcription

Here’s something real neat about the way SpinVox delivers your messages. First, unlike GotVoice, there doesn’t seem to be any limit on what can be sent to SMS. You’re still bound by carrier limits — usually 162 characters — but I haven’t had a problem receiving voice messages in my SMS inbox.

My favorite aspect of the SMS delivery is that it you receive voicemail transcriptions as if they are actually from the caller. For instance, during my tests, messages from my girlfriend continued a previous string of text messages we had exchanged the day prior. So this isn’t a text message from some random number. It is from the caller, which makes filtering messages much, much easier. And really, isn’t that the real beauty of these voice to text systems? The ability to better filter your message?

A few minutes after the message hits your SMS inbox, it sends to your primary email as well. At the end of the email is another feature: The ability to quick-check a message. If you want to listen to the message for whatever reason, just dial your voicemail box number, and press * plus the quick reference number. This allows you to skip other voice messages that you might not want to hear. The number also appears in parentheses at the end of the SMS delivery.

Security

Right off the bat, I found a quick “uh oh” with SpinVox. When you sign up for the service and activate call forwarding, you are encouraged to make a test call — that is, call your number from another phone. Since my house, like many bachelor pads, lacks a landline, I made the call from my Skype account.

The problem is that I didn’t get to leave a voicemail. Instead of playing my greeting and then allowing me to leave the message, it acted as though I, calling from Skype, was the voicemail box owner. I could listen to messages, change the greeting — basically do anything that the owner could do. Clearly, this is not good.

When I spoke to a representative from SpinVox, I was told it is an issue related to caller ID. Because Skype calls show up as an unrecognized number, the system can become confused. While a rare occurrence, it seems to be an issue for Skype and other VoIP calls. The solution is to add PIN protection to your voicemail box. This means that, like your regular voicemail box, that you have to enter your PIN every time you check messages. But that’s not so bad, right?

Additional features: Memo, Blast, Social Networks, Blog

While SpinVox thrives on its voice to text service, it offers a number of other useful services. You can record voice memos, which will be transcribed and sent to your email — an excellent feature for getting ideas down while in the car or otherwise unable to type out what you want to say. If you want to send a message to a number of recipients, you can do that with Blast. Twitter, Facebook, and Jaiku users can update their status message from SpinVox. And if you have a personal blog, you can use SpinVox to update that, too.

Once you sign up for the Blast service, you are provided a number to dial. Once there, you can speak your message. Just hang up, and it will be sent to the proper recipients. These recipients are set by logging into your SpinVox account via the Web and entering your contacts in the Blast field. You can then check and uncheck these contacts as need be.

The memo feature works in a similar way, except instead of sending the message to the people on your Blast list, it simply sends the transcription to your email account. It not only works well when you’re incapacitated, but also for when you want to make sure you see the note later in your email box, whereas if you’re like me, you might lose a note you jot down — or just not check your BlackBerry notes.

You’ll have to fill out some information prior to using the blog posting feature, including your blog address and other information to allow the system to access it. I’ll certainly be using this feature at future conventions. It’s a lot easier to sneak into a corner and speak a blog post, rather than find a place in the crowded media room and deal with the inevitably slow WiFi connection to get a post up. It is compatible with Blogger, Live Journal, Vox, and Typepad (sorry, no WordPress).

(So if you see some very basic, fundamental mistakes in my writing, you can assume I posted through SpinVox. Yep. That’s the ticket.)

Getting SpinVox

It’s hard not to get excited over the convenience of receiving your voicemails in text form. I absolutely loved GotVoice, and I’m equally enjoying SpinVox. Services like this are cutting down on the headaches of sitting through five-minute voicemails that never actually get to the point. And because of the quick reference feature, I’ll never actually have to listen to that voicemail, even if I want to listen to others.

You can test out the service for yourself at their website. It gives you a quick number to dial, and it will perform the voicemail transcription for you. After that, you’ll have to sign up for the service if you want to continue. A free trial version of the voicemail service is not currently available in the U.S., but you can check out their other features on a trial basis.

There may be a day in the not so distant future that we just cease communicating by voice. Okay, maybe that’s a little much. But we’ll at least have the option of sending our messages all via text. And for the most part, I couldn’t be happier about that.

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