One less chore…checking voicemail

I sent this to a few friends as part of my Fridays Musings.  I’ll keep you posted here if anything else happens on the voice mail saga.

We have borrowers at our house. I know because every morning as I take my children to school, the keys are not in the place I left them the night before. It is one of those life little annoyances.

Another one, voice mail. I profoundly dislike checking voice mail. I never remember my password, if I do, I can’t hear the message clearly, I can’t quite catch the name of the person calling, it is a miracle if I can write down the full phone number before the message ends, I always have to go back and replay the message just to find I pressed the wrong number and erased it!

I won’t bore you; the list of my grievances is long.

Just imagine, we have cell phones, business lines, home lines, fax, e-mail accounts, a basket for snail mail, the door of the refrigerator, the desk, post it notes, file drawers, computer files, palm pilots, digital recorders, dining room table, the front seat of the car and a few more places I am sure where information accumulates unattended.

What if we could consolidate some of those silos of information? How much time and energy will we save?

Well, there is hope thanks to two new services recently featured in New York Times Technology section. In his column, Freedom for Prisoners of Voice Mail, David Pogue featured two companies that have tackled this problem. Simulscribe and SpinVox usevoice recognition software to transcribe your messages and send them as text to your e-mail or as text messages to your cell phone. I vote we give the Nobel price to whoever came up with that idea!

I sent an e-mail late last night to the folks at SpinVox asking for a free trial (gamma@spinvox.com). They are offering 1 year free of charge to introduce the service in the U.S. I got an e-mail back this morning asking for my phone number, carrier, phone make, etc. For my friends in other parts of the world, I don’t know if you can take advantage of this service yet, but I’ll find out and let you know sometime in the future.

I’ll keep you posted about my experiences with this service on this blog.

In the meantime, I am looking for a service that allows my key ring to send me an e-mail every morning to tell me where the borrowers have taken the car keys that I swear I left in my purse the night before.

If you know of such a service, please let me know.