It’s official.  GotVoice has circled the ring and claimed the title of Best-in-Breed.  Was it our shiny coat?  Our brilliantly white teeth?  Our ability to resist the temptation to inappropriately sniff the competition?  Maybe.

Our development department contends it was because our new G2 platform uses advanced free-form speech recognition technology to provide unmatched voicemail-to-text accuracy and speed and that our new carrier-grade, high quality transcription engine is built for scalability and interoperates with all major voice & VoIP carriers.   That our unique technology pairing allows seamless access to any existing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and/or voicemail system, as well as voicemail-to-text conversion — without infrastructure upgrades or capital outlays.  Admittedly it’s pretty amazing. 

Still, I chalk up at least part of our victory to the creative use of trimming shears.  Kind of like the creative use of shears by my barber in college.  In fact, his creativity earned me the nickname “Flobie” after the nefarious vacuum haircutting machine of the same.  I know it seemed like a good idea at the time, but looking back on the experience I’d have to say it wasn’t one of my best ideas to choose a barber with an eyepatch. 

My first computer was an Apple IIe. I was eight and my parents bought it at a garage sale. It used floppy discs and had no printer - so when I wrote papers I couldn’t print them. Once, for a large project I simply turned off the computer and went to school with nothing to turn in. I had done the work, so bringing in the proof of it seemed redundant, and I figured Mr. Lamb would agree with my logic.

For voicemail messages, my strategy was similar. I would listen to a message, jot down the number and sometimes notes about the call on whatever scrap of paper was lying about, and then hope I got a hold of whoever I was trying to call before It was sort of a Genius strategy….by which of course I mean you would have had to be a genius for that strategy to work.

GotVoice does it slightly differently. You set a schedule. Then GotVoice retrieves messages off your phone and sends them to your email. Since you don’t have to call your voicemail, it saves you cell phone minutes. It even archives all of your messages, complete with caller ID and a place to jot notes, on your personal page forever. Drunk dial from an ex-girlfriend? Sober dial from your current girlfriend? Your friend calling you at 2am and promising to take your shift at Wetzel’s Pretzels if you come pick him up? Whatever the incriminating details, you have them.

No, it hasn’t revolutionized my life like say, easy cheese. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t still carry around little receipts and yellow sticky notes and scraps of yellow note paper with cryptic phone numbers and names. But at least now when I really need a number, and I washed my jeans then accidentally threw away the little gum wrapper with the phone number of my former professor who no longer teaches and isn’t listed, and whose letter of recommendation I desperately need to get into grad school or I won’t get accepted and will have to spend another entire year volunteering and waiting to reapply, instead of rooting through the trash or dialing at random the last four digits I can barely read on the newly cleaned gum wrapper, I just open my GotVoice page and scroll through my messages until I find it.
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Welcome to the GotVoice Blog! Why would you want to read this? Well, maybe you want to retrieve your voicemails from your email. Maybe you want to send an evite via your phone. Maybe you just like my particularly magnetic and narcissistic writing style. Whatever your reason, come one, come all, to the GotVoice Voice. And whenever we write something particularly interesting, make sure to tag us in a Technorati Profile, or Digg, or something like that.
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