Product Reviews

Voicemail can be very annoying. If you're not struggling to take down a phone number, you're somewhere that's too loud to hear properly or you don't have good enough reception. Using SpinVox's new voice-to-text software, you can get round these problems and have your messages converted to text and sent via SMS.

This works with any mobile network by redirecting your voicemail to the SpinVox service. Messages are converted automatically and it works really well. The conversion is impeccable, missing only the occasional word. When it does miss a word, it inserts a blank

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in the message or takes a stab at the word it thinks the caller said and puts a question mark after it. In all cases, we understood the context of a message.

The service is clever because it uses the caller's phone number as the sender of a text. So when you get a converted SMS, your phone looks up the number in its address book to display the caller's name. It also makes it easy to dial that person back or send an SMS to them. As most mobile networks have a text-to-voice service, you can text a message back to landlines.

The default service records messages up to 30 seconds long, but you can change this to three minutes. You can also turn on email to receive your messages in your inbox.

To listen to the original message, you have a voicemail number and can skip to a message using the Quick-Link code sent in the SMS message. However, as it's a regular phone number you'll be billed at standard rates.

We were really impressed with this service. Receiving all our messages as texts was much easier than using standard voicemail. For £5 a month you get 20 conversions, though there are other service plans available for heavy users.