Voicemail transcription — otherwise known as voice mail to text — has come to the world’s most popular IP communications software package, Skype (News - Alert).  SpinVox technology will be used to convert voice mails to text in the following languages to start: English, Spanish, French, and German. More from TMCnet.

 

I had a lunch with James Siminoff, founder and CEO of SimulScribe this past Monday, during which we discussed the voicemail transcription market.  James is pretty low key when it comes to estimates, and it seems I am more enthusiastic about the potential in this market than even he is.

 

What we did agree to as a baseline is that the market for these services should be as big as the smartphone space.  Deals like this one above with Skype can only expand the market for transcription services.

 

James tells me the pricing for his service is $0.25 per message with a $10 minimum per month.  His company is working on an unlimited plan as well.  There is more but I have to keep it under wraps for now.

 

The future of voice mail to text services could be — should be — much greater than the smartphone market for one reason alone: SMS.  What I mean is that, although SMS is not the best way to read long voice mails, a single SMS message can give you a good idea of what a voice mail is about.  I can’t imagine a subscriber who wouldn’t like their voice mails sent via SMS.  It is just so addictive when you start to use it.

 

Since carriers get paid for SMS traffic, and this traffic is slowly migrating to free e-mails on unlimited data plans, it makes sense for wireless carriers to start pushing any product that increases SMS usage. There is a massive amount of wireless carrier revenue to be made from voice mail transcription to SMS.

 

When you factor wireless carrier marketing into the equation, you see the market for such services can be triple or quadruple the size of the smartphone/Blackberry space, in terms of number of subscribers.