Monday 22 March 2010

Goodbye Spinvox, Hullo HulloMail


At the end of last week, Spinvox users received a text message from the provider stating that it is no longer supporting individual users and in 7 days their accounts would expire.

Although the principal concept of the Spinvox service was strong, the issues the firm faced with its core technology in correctly transcribing messages were widely publicised.

When I launched HulloMail in 2008, the key fundamentals were to deliver a new voice messaging service that is not only instant. Our service delivers voicemail directly to the mobile app, email or to your HulloMail account online so, with one click, you can play it. It’s there in an instant.

With this, it’s not only quick but you have the benefit of hearing the tone of the person’s voice, plus you can keep the messages or even share them online. I wanted our service to be flexible (and free).

Transcription is on our agenda and we do plan to integrate this into our service later this year. However, as transcription cannot be fully automated with speaker independent speech recognition engines, 100% accuracy can only be achieved via human intervention. This means charges would apply to customers, and so it is not something we want to do right now.
However, for any SpinVox users out there who are now looking for an alternative method of voicemail, I would encourage them to download our app for free to see how it suits their lifestyle.

And don’t just take our word for it. Ewan MacLeod from Mobile Industry Review is already a convert; “I swapped from SpinVox back in late July over to HulloMail. And I haven’t looked back. I thought that I might miss the semi reliable transcription of SMS from SpinVox. I reckoned that getting the ‘gist’ was good enough — and, for a long time, it was. But I’m not missing it one bit.”*

Andy Munarriz, founder
HulloMail
* http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2009/08/hullomail-30-days-later-and-im-still-loving-it.html


4 comments:

Daz said...

That's a shame as I quite liked the Spinvox product - it looked promising. I used it last year for a while but in the end had to ditch it. I could just about cope with the inaccuracies of the text transcription but what finally made me quit was they regularly just didn't bother converting to text, instead sending a text advising you to call to hear the message. Definity not what I want.

So I switched to Hullomail and have been a happy user since.

Jane Goodayle said...

glad to hear you are enjoying the HulloMail service. Any comments / suggestions we are always happy to receive them, keep in touch

Unknown said...

hullo hullomail. I had the opportunity to use hullo mail and spinvox for about a month each and I am now back on hullomail, whuch is great, but I do mis the sms notification that spinvox sent.

Jane Goodayle said...

Hey all, great to see you're enjoying the blog and more importantly the service. Frank - thanks for your comments, we're looking at notifications at the moment and will certainly take your comment on board.
Have a great Easter,
regards
Jane
Head of Marketing @HulloMail