Potty ideas # 18 voicemail to text

Spinvox have come up with this natty idea.  It reads your voice mail does a quick speech recognition job and sends you the voicemail as a text mesage on your mobile.

You couldn't make it up!  This is such a potty idea on so many levels. Even if it reliably works (which I couldn't try because their trial signup seems to be broken) why on earth would someone pay 25p per message for this? 

Voice mail is like email. The purpose of it is to hold messages until you have time to deal with them.  SMS is like Instant Messaging - it's for more urgent shorter messages.   People use the medium that suits the message.  Why don't we all have our emails translated into IM or SMS? (even if we could junk the junk mail) Technically easy, but email is the right medium for email messages.

Voice is voice - the words are only a fraction of the message.  Leave out the intonation and a simple jest could become a serious insult.  A missed or mis-recognised word could negate the meaning of a message. 

Expensive, risky and not even adding value.  I will pass on this one.

Bob
Textor