Yap Sees Gains in Voicemail to Text
Voicemail-to-text provider Yap this week signed two key clients, signifying a growing interest in voicemail transcription services among business users.
The clients were Vocalocity, a provider of small business Voice over Internet Protocol services, and PhoneFusion, a provider of hosted communications solutions.
“Voicemail-to-text is quickly becoming the killer app,” says Marcello Typrin, marketing vice president at Yap. “We all know how tedious voicemail can be, calling in, listening to the IVR, and going through the menus. It’s much easier to sit down and read your messages at your leisure.”
According to Typrin, the biggest opportunities for voicemail-to-text services are in enterprise messaging and the carrier space, and Vocalocity and PhoneFusion are good examples of that.
"Our small business customers are extremely busy, spending much of their day servicing customers, managing business operations, and overseeing employees," David Politis, executive vice president and general manager at Vocalocity, said in a statement. "Voicemail transcription services that convert voice messages into an email are a tremendous time-saver, allowing our customers to make the most of their busy day."
The free, visual voicemail application gives users the ability to centralize all of their voicemail boxes and see right on screen a list of their voicemail messages. By converting voicemail to text, users can read messages in a fraction of the time it takes to dial a voicemail box and listen to the details. With the voicemail content in text format, it can easily be stored, indexed, or shared with coworkers. Users also can listen to the voice message by opening an attached audio file without dialing in and navigating through voicemail menus.
Voicemail transcription from Vocalocity is available for $4.99 per mailbox per month following an initial 30-day free trial of the feature. PhoneFusion charges just 99 cents per month for unlimited voicemail-to-text conversions.
But beyond the cost, privacy is a big concern. “Ours is 100 percent fully automated, which is really important to our customers,” Typrin says.