Telstra launches Australia's first voice to text service

Telstra partners with UK firm SpinVox to provide its business customers with Australia’s first service which converts voicemails to text messages.

Subscribers to the Voice2Text service will have their voice messages sent as a text message to their mobiles, letting them read voicemail messages, as well as listen to them.

Business customers will have the choice of three pricing options: $10 for 25 messages, $20 for 80 messages or pay as you go at 55 cents per message. Telstra will look to make Voice2Text available to its consumer customers in 2008.

Speaking today at the Sydney launch of the partnership, Daniel Doulton, co-founder and chief strategy officer at SpinVox, said: “The one thing that we do well is convert a voice message into text. That is what we have built our products around.”

Doulton claimed the service is 97 percent accurate and there is always the option to listen to the original message.

“We are launching with Telstra in Australia and they will be the first to market with this in the local market. We see Australia as a key market to reach the rest of Asia,” added Doulton.

Deena Shiff, Telstra Group managing director, said the service would be available to Telstra’s business, government and enterprise customers from the end of November and was set to help people better manage their communications.

“Voice2Text saves time and improves productivity and means customers never need miss an important or urgent message, even when they’re in a meeting,” she said.

Roberto Vannini, executive director of wireless and mobility products at Telstra, added: “Our customer trials have shown great levels of conversion quality and effectiveness.”