CallWave – VoiceMail 2.0

Those who know me well enough to call me know that my voicemail box is always full. I keep it that way on purpose. I never listen to voicemail and assume that if you need something and I don’t answer you’ll email, SMS, twitter, IM, or blog it at me. I keep my box full so people can’t leave a message and think they’ve gotten to me – I HATE voicemail!

Well, not anymore. I would like to introduce you to CallWave. For the last month I’ve been using CallWave and I LOVE IT!

CallWave is a voicemail system that basically gets rid of voicemail. When someone leaves a message, it does a speech to text conversion and then does several things with it: 1) it sends you an SMS Text message with the “gist” of the voicemail 2) it sends you an email with the gist of the message AND a .wav file of the actual voicemail and 3) lists the same information, including the mp3, on your page on CallWave.com.

At first I was skeptical of how good their “gist” message would be. After using it for a month I can tell you that it’s awesome! Sure, the spelling, grammar, actual text of the gist doesn’t always make a lot of sense – but it feels very much like the truncation that we all use in SMS and Twitter messages – and it always makes enough sense that you get the “gist” of the message. If you need to know more than what was in the SMS message, the email shows up very promptly and you can listen to the .wav of the call right away.

Here’s the “gist” from a voicemail I received today:

…is calling for me BC. Computers about your computer – I’ve been trying to get P professional installed on there we have over here. Only over here and we cannot get it to install with your key I don’t know if you have a corporate copy if you have – retail copy maybe that’s the difference if you could bring by the CD that might be able to fix our problem or if you want to a pretty give me a call back I’d be happy to verify the keys I have here on file with you over the phone – the number here is it a 18860100 in my name is ?Lucas have a nice day.

The literal translation of that first part is: “calling from EBC Computers about your computer – I’ve been trying to get XP Professional”… so, you can see that while it’s not perfect in the gist message, because I know I have a computer being repaired at EBC I know exactly what he’s talking about.

Both the email and the SMS include the caller ID number of the phone that left the message, making it easy (at least on a smartphone, I don’t know about those iPhone thingies) to call them back right there.

Probably the most useful side affect of a CallWave SMS from your voicemail is that if you’re in a meeting and you get a phone call that you can’t take and they leave a voicemail, you actual get the gist of it texted to you within 1 minute. So, while you’re still sitting in that meeting you can read the text message and decide if you need to excuse yourself and call them back right away. Or, if you know they called from a cell phone, you can text them a response to their voicemail.

CallWave has made me interested in voicemail again – now I pay attention to every voicemail that comes in, and I’m easily able to act on it! Even if you do actually like voicemail, I suggest you still take a look at CallWave, you’ll suddenly have an email record of every voicemail, be able to react to voicemail at inconvienent times and save the .wav file on your computer if the voicemail was something worth hanging on to.

Right now, the service is free, their site says it’s “Free while in beta” which means they are probably going to start charging for it at some point – at which point I’ll start paying for it! Also, if you’re one of my friends who knows I don’t listen to voicemail, go ahead and start leaving it, I love getting voicemail now!

Are you a voicemail hater? What would keep you from switching to a voicemail service like this?