For the past 14 years I've had an extreme dislike for voicemail in general. Most of the messages consist of "give me a call", odds are I saw your number in my received / missed calls list. I usually don't ignore phone calls, I do try to be considerate when speaking with other people to silence my phone and continue talking and will call you back shortly after and sometimes I just didn't feel like talking on the phone. Therefore I don't check my voice mail very often, until my VM box won't accept any more messages. In this great day of web 2.0 startups SpinVox helps to bridge the gap. With some trickery and cooperation with the cellphone carriers, I now get all my voice mail converted to text delivered via email and SMS (I've opted out of SMS for now).
After a day of usage it works great - I get my messages in a timely manner and don't have to try to remember foreign numbers while I'm driving and dialing in my 2 hour commute. From what I can tell they are using a pretty good speech to text engine or a distributed human computing model, either way it works very well only name fumble in the past 5 messages. The best part is all the messages are stored with a quick access code so you are not required to wade through the 20 unreviewed messages and then finally get to the message where you need to assess the urgency of a call based on the inflection of the offenders voice.
