Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 07, 2006 by CyberNet.

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Do you remember what a short time ago that it was when answering machines were saving our phone messages? There were the ones that had limited storage or maybe you had the one that took the mini tapes? Either way we are seeing those answering machines fade out as the days go by and voicemail is the replacement.

The problem is that people don’t have just one phone that they need to retrieve messages from. Instead there are so many of us that have 2 cellphones (or more), a home phone, a work phone, and the list can go on and on. GotVoice is aimed to simplify how you access your voicemail by delivering it straight to your email just like Vonage does for their VoIP users.

There are currently three plans available:

As you can tell from the table the biggest difference between the plans are how many times your voicemail is checked throughout the day. You can schedule the checks yourself based upon a large chart of times that are listed in 30-minute intervals. Most people who receive many messages a day would probably want to pay for the Premium version which will give you 24 checks each day. That means you could schedule a voicemail retrieval every 30-minutes from 7:00AM to 5:00PM and still have 4 checks left over to use during the night time.

Here is what the scheduling chart looks like:

As you can see in the image it is extremely easy to customize your schedule. Just click on the times that you want GotVoice to retrieve your messages and all you have to do is watch your email. They even add a button to the right of each row which will let you schedule the same time for each day of the week.

What if you never want to check a message on your phone again? You don’t have to worry about your voicemail filling up because users of the free GotVoice service can have the messages on their phone deleted every Sunday night. If you decide to pay for the service then you can even have all your message deleted every night. At first you will probably say “I’ll leave the messages on the phone just in case” but after a little while you will see how little you call your voicemail when you can just check it with your email.

After your messages have been downloaded GotVoice will mark them as “listened to” on your phone. That way it is always easy to distinguish which messages GotVoice has already retrieved when calling your voicemail on your phone.

There are also a variety of ways to manually retrieve your messages. The most common way would be to visit your Message Management screen where there is a “Retrieve New” button. A more convenient way is using the simple program that they offer which runs in your system tray. From there you can check for new messages or delete the messages that are on your phone. The only thing that it lacks is a way to configure your account (like schedule your message retrievals) .

I do have a gripe with the emails that they send. They display two advertisements in each email which make up a large portion of the content. Of course, for free users this is expected but I get the ads even as a paid user. In the past I have rarely seen services contain advertisements if you already have to pay upfront. I guess I will have to admit that I actually don’t “see” the advertisements though because I use GMail and it is set to block images from them . No big deal.

So are the paid versions of GotVoice worth it? After using the Premium service for a week I have to say that the free service is plenty for me. I don’t receive enough voicemails in a days time. However, what works for me may not always work for you. If you’re receiving many voicemails a day, a paid service would be more than worth it and convenient. They boast the great MP3 attachment feature which is a great addition for the paid users and could become a convenient way to access your messages. For myself, I found that I like to click on the link I receive in the email and have it start playing on their Website versus the MP3. The message starts playing less than 5 seconds after I click the link when I would have to otherwise wait for my music player to open before it can start playing the MP3. The RSS feed in the Premium version would be useful for anyone that owns an iPod because you can have iTunes put all of your voicemails right on your iPod!

Overall I would say that GotVoice is well worth the few minutes it will take to set everything up. I highly recommend that you at least try out the free service, and if you like it, it will probably be worth paying the monthly fee for the Premium or Plus accounts. Remember that with the free service you only get 3 scheduled message retrievals per day, but you can manually retrieve them as much as you want! That’s where the desktop app really starts to shine.

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