Voicemail-2-SMS Service Launched in South Africa

A new cellphone service arrives in South Africa today, when UK company, SpinVox enables Vodacom to launch the first Voicemail-to-Text service in Africa. This service, which is growing fast in Europe and the USA, converts voicemails into text messages so that it is no longer necessary to dial in to the voicemail service.

The service, which will be marketed to Vodacom customers as Voicemail2SMS, was created by SpinVox in 2003 and first launched to consumers in 2004. At a glance, Vodacom customers with SpinVox will be able to view English language voicemails as text messages, see who called, and with one simple click, choose to call or text back directly.

The idea for SpinVox came to Christina Domecq, co-founder and CEO, in 2003 when, coming out of a long meeting, she received 14 voicemails and asked: "Why can't I get my voicemails as text?" This moment of frustration led her to co-found SpinVox with Daniel Doulton, since when they have rolled out the service in North America, Europe and now Africa - with Australia the next target. SpinVox is available in English, French, German and Spanish, with more languages planned.

Since its launch of Voicemail-to-Text, SpinVox has introduced a further seven world-first products to create a new category of messaging - Voice-to-Screen - converting any voice message to text and delivering it to any screen. SpinVox forecasts a global subscriber base of at least six million in the first quarter of 2008.

At the heart of SpinVox is its Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS), which works by combining computer-based state-of-the-art speech technologies with a live-learning language process.

Posted to the site on 12th October 2007