Verizon launches visual voicemail

Voicemail, a mobile feature virtually untouched since its inception, has been given more attention as carriers aim to increase their appeal to the practical-minded prosumer. While carriers have been slow to adopt new voicemail platforms, vendors have been working on different solutions for a while now. PhoneFusion, which provides a free service for smartphone users to centralize their voice mailboxes, is another provider using the visual interface to display messages. This month, the vendor introduced a beta version of its service for the Blackberry.

Converting voice to text messages has been another popular twist on voicemail. Startup YouMail is a voicemail service, launched this month, that lets subscribers forward their calls from their provider’s mailbox to their YouMail account, where messages are recorded and sent as text and email, listing the caller’s name, call length and location of the call. Messages transcribed to text to be read on the computer or phone. Subscribers can access their YouMail account by assigning the number one to that mailbox or, for those with a data plan, the Web-version of the service resembles the iPhone’s visual voicemail. Emailed messages can also be listened to in MP3 format.

Other voicemail-to-text vendors include PhoneTag and SpinVox, which received $100 million in funding in March. Web services providers offering similar integration technologies include RingCentral, Google’s Grand Central, Pinger, Jott, GotVoice and SimulScribe.

Macri said that the market for visual voicemail has been around for a while now, a sentiment other vendors have echoed, but it took the carriers getting on board for it to really pick up steam. Advancements like the iPhone have stimulated demand, and some vendors have been more prepared than others to meet it, he said.

“Comverse has been leading this for a long time,” Marci said. “Maybe we didn’t do as good of a job marketing as we could have, but the concept has been out for a long time. I do believe there’s no doubt that Apple has had a huge impact on the market place, turning on what was a push into a pull and a pull into a push for us. It has created huge interest. But I would have to say for the consumers that we know well, they’ve been moving aggressively towards it.”