Voicemail To Text With Quicktate

As I write this, I have just completed day two of walking through the seemingly countless exhibits at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). With all the new gadgets, concepts, websites and services presented to me, it was extremely difficult to choose which to write about first. Finally, I decided to tell you about Quicktate, since I’ve been taking advantage of the service from the moment I visited its booth on the first day of the show.

Quicktate transcribes your voicemail into text and sends it to you as a text message or an e-mail. This concept has been around for awhile, but at the moment you can sign up for Quicktate’s free beta. It’s quick to set yourself up - I did it in a couple of minutes right at the booth. I completed the requested information on the website, and it sent me an e-mail confirmation and set me up with my own Quicktate message phone number instantaneously (with a Hawaii 808 area code, too). I then set my cell phone’s regular voicemail to forward to this number, and now all my messages are transcribed into text and sent to my phone as text messages, and e-mailed to me too.


This is coming in handy especially at the show; since I may not hear the phone ring, and can read the messages when I finally have a chance to look at my phone. In general, you can use this when you’re in a movie theater, driving (safer not to answer your phone) or whenever you cannot answer your phone.

In addition, you can use Quicktate to send (call-in) personal notes to yourself, such as a shopping list, todos, etc. In my case, I can call myself and make a verbal list of all these things I’m seeing at the show for future story ideas. This is also perfect if you need to print out important messages, or to copy and paste phone numbers into your address book. For the hearing-impaired community, this is an excellent tool as well.

Log onto www.quicktate.com to participate in this free beta, and to sign up for an account of your own. If you ever want to switch your voicemail back to regular audible voicemail, you can easily un-forward to your special number.

For comparisons, here are a few other companies that offer a similar service (note that they are not all not free):

CallWave (www.callwave.com) - Free

Phonewire (www.phonewire.com) - Plans start at $9/month/30 minutes

SimulScribe (www.simulscribe.com) -$9.95/month/40 messages or $29.95/unlimited

SpinVox (www.ureach.com/spinvox) -$9.99/month/40 messages