Getting the Word out

UK mobile phone users wanting to receive their voicemails as text messages have a choice of providers as VoxSciences becomes the second company to offer consumer voice recognition services to the UK mobile market.

VoxSciences is attracted to the new, yet rapidly growing market of voicemail-to-text users who are already of the opinion that traditional voicemail is dead. There is still a largely untapped market of at least 60 million potential subscribers in the UK, and VoxSciences intends to offer an economical and quality alternative to the existing UK supplier. Using its powerful VERBS (Virtual Engine for Recognition of Basic Speech) engine Voxsciences’ voicemail-to-text service saves subscribers time and money otherwise spent dialling in and laboriously listening to their voice messages.

Technology entrepreneur Ken Blackman, who has taken several tech companies to M&A or IPO over the last 25 years, is funding the initial start up of VoxSciences. The last company he took to sale in 2004 was PumaOne, a unified messaging company, which benefited from the rapid decline of the fax machine in favour of fax-to-email services. Blackman predicts a similar trend now as users choose to leave traditional voicemail services for more efficient, convenient, and immediate alternatives. He explains,

“In a period of economic downturn any financial saving to the consumer is attractive. With the recent advance of voice recognition software there is far less need for consumers to dial into their phone operators to pick up voice messages. Furthermore, listening to voicemails when abroad can be even more inconvenient and expensive. Subscribers will benefit from immediacy and lost cost options simply by switching to VoxSciences to convert these messages to text”.

Associated Link: Vox Sciences on the Death of Voicemail

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