Long-distance charges and wireless roaming fees can add up fast when calling from outside Canada to check voice mail, but the cost of receiving voice mail converted into a short text message or e-mail is typically much less than a phone call. (Wong Maye-E/AP)

Next time you're in a meeting and notice some of the other participants staring at their handheld screens rather than paying attention, don't assume they're checking e-mail or text messages.

They could be reading their voice mail.

New services from several Canadian cellphone carriers use speech recognition to convert voice into text. Then they send the text either as one or more text messages to a mobile phone, or as e-mail that can be received and read on either a computer or a mobile device. (Paul Sakuma/AP)

Readable voice mail services are a relatively new territory for Canadian telecom carriers. In September 2007, SaskTel became the first phone company in the country to launch a system that translates voice messages into text and sends them as e-mail or text messages to subscribers' computers, personal digital assistants or mobile phones. In early December, Rogers Wireless launched a similar service.

Telus Corp. launched its own SpinVox-based service, Telus Visual Voicemail, in early February.

All three services are based on technology from Marlow, U.K.-based SpinVox Ltd. SaskTel charges $25 a month for unlimited messages, $10 a month for up to 40 messages, or 40 cents a message on a pay-per-use basis. Telus and Rogers are both $15 a month for unlimited messages, and Telus also offers a 50-cents-per message pay-per-use option.

New York-based SimulScribe has also moved into Canada with a similar service it launched in the U.S. in 2007. Company president James Siminoff says its service works with virtually any mobile or landline carrier's voice mail, including those offered by cable TV companies and voice-over-internet providers such as Vonage Corp. SimulScribe charges $29.99 US per month for unlimited messages or $9.99 for up to 40 messages, or 35 cents a message for its pay-per-use option.

How it works

All these services use speech recognition to convert voice into text. Then they send the text either as one or more text messages to a mobile phone, or as e-mail that can be received and read on either a computer or a mobile device.

Some services, such as SaskTel's, can attach an audio file of the original voice message to the e-mail.

Merrilee Rasmussen, a Regina lawyer who was among the first customers for SaskTel's voice-mail-to-text service, says she signed up because she works alone and is out of her office frequently. "Sometimes it's difficult to call in and check messages," she says, "and I confess that often I forget."

Now Rasmussen's voice mail comes to both her desktop computer and her BlackBerry in e-mail form, so she is alerted almost as soon as a message arrives.

Saving time, airtime

Rasmussen says she tries not to check e-mail or voice messages during meetings, but the voice-to-text service makes it easier to do a quick and discreet check for urgent messages during a short break.

Checking messages during meetings is sure to be part of the appeal, though. Andy Tate, a spokesman for SaskTel, admits he does it and thinks it will be one of the main ways people use the service at work.

While caller ID can usually tell you who called, voicemail-to-text goes a step farther by letting you see what they called about, says Mark Applebaum, principal for mobility business solutions at Telus. If the matter needs urgent attention, you can reply or forward the text message to a colleague.

The services can also help travelers cut mobile phone roaming charges while outside the country, notes Amit Kaminer, an analyst with telecommunications research firm SeaBoard Group in Toronto. Roaming charges can add up fast when calling from outside Canada to check voice mail, but the cost of receiving a short text message or e-mail is typically much less than a phone call.

Text messages, for example, carry a roaming charge of 30 cents each, says Irv Witte, Rogers' vice-president of business marketing. The cost of a cellphone call when roaming overseas, in comparison, typically ranges from $1 to $3 per minute.

The services could also be help people with hearing impairments, Kaminer notes.

Caveats

However, Kaminer has a few reservations, too. The first is how accurately messages will be translated into text. "When somebody leaves you a voice mail it could be on any subject, on any topic, on any issue and the array of words is almost unlimited."

CBCnews.ca tried Rogers' version of the SpinVox service for this story and found the translation accurate most of the time. Rasmussen says that in her experience the SaskTel service makes some mistakes — "the unanticipated plus is that you get these amusing little translations sometimes," she says — but is good enough that messages are understandable even when there are errors in the text.

Part of the secret behind SpinVox's system is that while most of the voice recognition is done by software, troublesome snippets are passed to human operators to figure out. These operators hear only a few words that the system is having trouble converting to text, and they don't know who the speaker is, Witte notes.

Still, Kaminer wonders if there could be security and privacy implications in having voice messages transmitted to a third party.

Delivering voice messages as text may also be awkward because of the length limitation, particularly when being sent by short-message-service (SMS), Kaminer warns. If long voice messages are truncated, key information such as the callback number could be lost. Spinvox can break a voice mail into two or three text messages, but long messages are still truncated.

SaskTel, Telus and SimulScribe offer the option of sending voice messages to e-mail, which permits longer messages. Rogers currently doesn't; Witte says it might be added in future.

Kaminer also notes that voice-to-text services aren't the only way to bring voice mail and e-mail together in one place. Vonage, for instance, can e-mail voice messages as attached audio files or subscribers can retrieve them from a website and listen to them.

At the end of January, Bell Canada launched a similar service for both wireline and mobile subscribers.

While Bell has not launched a voice-mail-to-text service, it recently unveiled the ability to do the opposite — text messages sent from Bell mobile phones can be converted to synthesized speech and delivered to ordinary telephones. Bell spokesman Nicolas Poitras says this and the online voicemail service were the new features subscribers were asking for the most.

As far as Rasmussen is concerned, she's quickly come to rely on the voice-mail-to-text service to help ensure she gets her messages promptly. That's important in her profession, she notes, since "people tend to leave their legal problems till the last minute."

The author is a freelance writer based in Kingston.

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