Skype users can now have their voicemails converted into text via SpinVox. Today, SpinVox announced that your Skype voicemails transcribed and sent to you via SMS for €0.20/£0.17/25 cents plus the cost of the SMS. SimulScribe, now PhoneTag, is a similar service, that Rich Tehrani uses regularly. GotVoice is yet another one.

But how about another cool TTS app that is currently 'free' and works with the popular open source Asterisk platform? Weavver's VoiceScribe is a beta web-service for Asterisk that converts your voicemail to text and delivers them to you via e-mail. What's cool about this is how easy it is to integrate with Asterisk, trixbox CE, and trixbox Pro. I tested it with trixbox Pro and it worked flawlessly in just minutes. It uses the Nuance engine. The accuracy was OK, but I'm told by Weavver's Mitchel Constantin, "Quality will get much better."

Simply edit /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf, go to the [general] section and make sure wav49 is the default format. Also add a line with mailcmd that sends an email with your voicemail attachment to their hosted servers.

Here's a sample of the 4 lines you need in voicemail.conf:
format = wav49|gsm|wav
serveremail = asterisk
attach = yes
mailcmd = /usr/sbin/sendmail [email protected]

Don't worry, the email being sent contains headers with information on who the voicemail belongs to, so it will be sent back to you. Assuming of course you configured your Asterisk extensions properly with corresponding email addresses.

After you make that change apply it to Asterisk by reloading your voicemail settings. From the Linux console on the Asterisk server, simply type:
asterisk -vvrx "reload app_voicemail.so"

Then leave yourself a test voicemessage and within 20-30s or so, you'll get an email with the voicemail transcribed. Good stuff!

Asterisk fans - head on over to http://www.weavver.com/ for more info and to try it out.