Callwave: The New Voicemail

I found this company through Robert Scoble's blog: Scobleizer. He interviewed the VP of Business Development for Callwave, Josh Fraser, for his show. I watched the video and went straight to the site to sign up!

Callwave is an online, third party, voice mail service that replaces your service provider's voicemail box. Through a simple activation process you can have your voicemails txted and/or emailed to you. Callwave uses voice recognition software that translates your voicemails to text and sends out the main part (gist) of a voicemail message to your phone. In the demo video you'll also see that Callwave allows you to listen to voicemails as they are being left, answer calls online, or have them forwarded to another phone line of your choice. You can also access all the messages via the web, and archive them. From the online site you can also txt responses, and call people back. Callwave is currently offering the service for free while in beta. I've mentioned it a few people already and their are having a blast with it!

This is a great tool and is very useful for those who don't like calling their voicemail boxes. I took a full tour of the software and put it to the test. First, its no surprise that this service is not perfect (they are of course in the beta stage). For my first message I had a friend of mine call and leave a quick blurb.

She stated: "I dont know what it's made of, probably some kind of fabric. Is that enough talking for you? Uh-huh... bye Merlin."

The txt I received did not represent the service well.

It was, " ...nato probably some kind of yeah Rick set it off tossing 4 years - fall is always a 4 oops Maryland."

Granted, she did not speak clearly, and the voice recognition seems to have trouble understanding my name (it hardly ever comes through correctly). The second test was a message left by myself and came out just fine. I found that as long as the person speaks clearly the software doesn't make many mistakes. However, most of the messages I receive do not have the caller's name when they announce who is calling in the voicemail. That is one of the issues I found with their "gist" messaging. I would prefer to have the whole message txt to me, or at least the name of the person.

The emails you receive will display the name of the person the phone line is billed to (seen below); much like Caller ID. For those of us with extensive contact lists there seems to be no way of importing your phone contacts into the Callwave system. It looks like you have to import them manually if you want them online.

The online texting portion of the software works very well, and I have had no trouble listening to my voicemails on the website. The beta is limited in that it does not feature all the options in the demo video - which was rather disappointing. There are desktop widgets available as well. One for Google, Yahoo!, Apple, and Windows Vista. I didn't take the opportunity to test these - I don't use Google or Yahoo! home, don't have a Mac, and no Vista. I have read the reviews, and some cellphone providers seemed to have charged customers for replacing their voicemail service. However, I use Verizon and haven't seen any change in my billing (I suspect that its a problem connected to the widget).

For a free beta version Callwave is awesome! It is a very helpful tool, even when it doesn't translate everything correctly. There are always kinks with a software debut, but don't let that stop you. Give them a try! I'm excited to see where they go with all the feedback, and look forward to following their progress.