YouMail — Visual Voicemail for the iPhone-Free Masses

I'm a texter.  I'm addicted.  I actually prefer texting to phone calls; you can talk to seven people at once as opposed to just one, and SMS messages tend to cut down on conversational fluff that saps your precious time.  Because most people aren't addicted like me, they don't care to shoot the breeze with their fingers.  In fact, that tends to mean they don't text me at all, but leave me voicemail after voicemail, in spite of the fact that I tell them I very rarely check my voicemail.

Unfortunately, that usually ends with many voicemails going unchecked for some time, me continuing to tell people to email or text me, and us both being at a stand-off of communication methods.  I'm a writer and the written word, considering my vocation, is simply a better method of communication.  

However, most folks just won't relent on voicemails, and I'm just not comfortable with telling everyone in my voicemail message that they could reach me more effectively via text message.  Then I found YouMail.  It is like the technology gods heard my prayer for a medium between text and voice and sent me blessing from the heavens.

YouMail is a voicemail service that forwards your calls from your normal provider's mailbox to your YouMail account.  It records your messages, and can send you a text and email notification of the call, including the name of the caller (based on caller ID), the call length, and the location the call came from. Upon trying the service, the text message notification was nearly instantaneous; was my fantasy realized?

It gets better.  You can access your messages in the classic manner by assigning the number 1 key to go to your YouMail, but if you have data, you can access your visual voicemail just like you would on the iPhone but loading up the custom web version of YouMail.  From there you can select individual messages, delete them without hearing them, and generally do everything you might do with AT&T's visual voicemail…but for free.  You can also listen to your messages in .Mp3 form when they are sent to you in email form, and can access them from the website.  It gets better.

The most exciting thing about YouMail is that the YouMail team has recently introduced a completely new feature that is making me the happiest texter on the planet:  Your messages can be transcribed to text, and from there sent to you in email or text, and be read on your computer or phone.  The system isn't quite perfect…obviously vocal recognition is tricky.  But people, it is free! And on top of that, it works quite well.  I tested the transcription with my colleague Leslie, and the transcription was near to perfect.  Obviously you can generally ascertain the intent of the message, even if the whole script isn't perfect.

Frankly, for a free service, I think YouMail surpasses the iPhone's visual voicemail with the text transcription.  With the transcriptions, I can now delete messages I know are from sales people, and prioritize my reply phone calls based on the messages I get without even listening to everything. In fact, I have to say that visual voicemail was one of the largest features that attracted me to the iPhone.  I would have been willing to compromise the touchscreen keyboard (that I don't care for) if I could have the visual voicemail, considering my sincere dislike of voicemail.  But why on earth would I choose the iPhone when YouMail lets me have improved visual voicemail on a Blackberry, HTC, Palm or other phone I choose regardless of my carrier?  

I take my hat off to you, YouMail.  You have blessed the life of someone who was vehemently anti-voicemail by bridging the gap between the voice lovers and the text heads.  I give you two well-worn texting thumbs way up!