YouMail Announces New Voicemail Transcription Services

Voicemail services company YouMail yesterday expanded its offerings to include four premium voicemail transcription service packages.

 

The packages range in price from $3.99 per month to $17.99 per month and supplement the company’s basic free service, Read-It Free, which provides subscribers with fast automated transcription of voicemails from a predetermined contact, like a significant other, or a limited number of messages in a given month.

 

But unlike the free service, the premium offerings allow subscribers to provide YouMail with feedback and/or corrections to improve future transcripts. Subscribers can also choose to have their transcripts performed by humans through third-party contractors.

 

“YouMail captures the voicemail and sends it off to the third-party. They transcribe it fully and return it to us, and then we send it back to [the subscriber],” explains Alex Quilici, YouMail’s CEO. “Our goal is to get the message to the user in three to four minutes with an accuracy target of at least 95 percent.”

 

Quilici maintains that the human element gives YouMail the opportunity to return much higher-quality transcripts to subscribers at a lower cost. “People are very good at noise cancellation, and are better at name recognition, things that speech [technologies have not been] very good at,” he says.

 

But still, some people might not be comfortable having other people involved in their voicemails, so for them, the fully automated service is still available with the premium services.

 

The offerings are as follows:

• Read-It Text: High-quality transcription sent as a single SMS to let decide what a voicemail is about and whether or not to retrieve it. This option, priced at $3.99 per month, provides 50 transcribed messages per month.
• Read-It Select: High-quality transcription delivered as an email. Designed for users with smart phones to avoid dialing your voicemail to receive messages. This option, which costs $6.99 per month, provides 50 transcribed messages per month.
• Read-It Text Unlimited: High-quality transcription that fits in a single SMS. Designed for users without smart phones who receive a lot of voicemail, this option provides unlimited transcribed SMS messages per month for $9.99.
• Read-It Select Unlimited: High-quality transcription delivered as an email. Designed for users with smart phones who receive a lot of voicemail. This option provides unlimited transcribed e-mail messages per month for $17.99.

In addition to the new transcription service, YouMail has also partnered with the creators of the original Crazy Calls answering machine messages to provide users with another fun way to customize their mobile voicemail greetings. There are several hundred premium greetings that will be available for purchase by YouMail users for $1.99 each.