Visual Voicemail – YouMail, PhoneTag or Google Voice?

YouMail is one of the many visual voicemail providers that you can sign up for and redirect your phone’s voice-mail through. They have a number of transcription plans and claim a voicemail-to-text transcription accuracy of 95%. Their boast is that it’s much better than Google Voice which comes in at 80%.

One major difference between the two is that YouMail does use human listening and proofreading, and as  Google Voice user, I’m not even sure their accuracy is 80%. Well let me put it this way – I’m forced to listen to voicemails at least half the time, as the transcription is much too garbled. Hilarious sometimes, but typically useless.

YouMail has some interesting plans, many of which will only transcribe up to 1 minute of voicemails, their claim being that most voicemails don’t last that long. That may be true, but I’d rather get the whole thing transcribed than having to both read and listen. Their plans start at a very reasonable $3.99/mo for 50 voicemails per month.

PhoneTag (was Simulscribe) – which we were surprisingly impressed with – now offers a per-voicemail plan ($0.35/transcription) which is really reasonable for those of us that simply do more text-based comm.

All in all, I’d just rather see Google buy one of these providers that do voicemail-to-text well and integrate that technology into G Voice, because at the end of the day, Google Voice is a much more complete, integrated voice and text communication product than these standalone v-2-t solutions.