What is Visual Voicemail?

Visual voicemail is a nice feature in modern phone systems, especially in VoIP calling service, that allows you to check your voicemail with some enhanced options and transcribed into text. 

To better understand what visual voicemail is, compare it to traditional voicemail. Traditionally, when you have a number of voicemails, you normally hear an automated voice telling you something that would resemble this:

“You have 3 voice messages. The first message is …”

Then you would hear the first one. This loops until you hear the last, and after each message, you are recited a number of options like:

“To listen to the message again, press 2; to delete the message, press 3; to listen to the next message...blah, blah...”

With visual voicemail, you have a list of the voicemail messages displayed on your phone’s screen or that of your computer. You also have a menu with several options, just like for email. The options allow you to navigate, arrange, manage, listen, re-listen, delete, call back, send back a message etc.

The number of services including it as a feature and the number of devices supporting it is increasing. The very first smartphone to support it is Apple’s iPhone back it 2007. Followed it several other devices like Samsung’s Instinct and a couple of BlackBerry devices. Today, you can have visual voicemail running on almost any smartphone, especially if they run iOS and Android. 

If you have a VoIP phone service running at home or in your office, you can check with your service provider whether visual voicemail is one of their offered features. Else, if you have an iPhone or an Android device, there are numerous apps on the market that can empower your device with it. Here is a short list: 

• YouMail, which is the very first app for smartphones to implement visual voicemail. 
• Google Voice. This well-known service runs on computers and an app is available for iOS and Android. 
• Visual Voicemail Plus, available only for Android. It can also manage Internet faxing. 
• The iPhone's native voicemail feature. 
• VisionMail, which is available only for the iPhone. 

• Visual voicemail has the advantage of giving you, in one glimpse, a series of important information about all the voicemail messages, like the caller, time, duration etc. This allows you to save a tremendous amount of time, that which you would have spent with traditional audio voicemail retrieval.

• Visual voicemail also works with voicemail-to-text transcription, a feature that transcribes the audio message into a text to be read instead of listened to. This brings discretion around, such that you do not need to have every ear present to listen to your voice messages. 
• With your voicemail transcribed into written text, it is easier for you to access them anywhere. You no longer need audio hardware for retrieving your messages. Your email suffices, and this is available everywhere. 
• The text is much lighter than audio. This helps a lot in saving storage space, be in on servers or disks. Moreover, transmission over networks is faster. 
• With your audio messages transcribed into text, you can easily forward them to other parties.