Sometimes a Tsunami is OK

I prepay a year's worth of service from Vonage, my VOIP provider because of the nice discount they provide for doing so. Recently they started providing, at no extra charge, their Visual Voice mail product to customers like myself that prepay, so I followed the directions and turned it on.

In a standard Vonage account, when you get an voice mail, it sends out an email with the phone number of the person leaving the voice mail and .WAV file version of the message that was left. While this is certainly usable, it is not always convenient listening to the voice mail either by dialing into my account or playing the .WAV file.

With this new service Vonage attempts to convert the message that was left into text and place that into the email that is sent. My first few experiences getting my voice mails this way have been acceptable in that you can get the general idea what the caller meant when they called, but I wouldn't want to rely on the details as they sometimes take guesses as to what the caller said.

In some cases, the translation is more comedic then accurate, but after I stopped laughing, I figured out that the message below was actually referring to the Salvation Army vs. the mysterious "Salvage Tsunami"

While I am usually looking for services and technology that are better then the usual "good enough", that Corporate America normally delivers, the "free" Vonage visual voice mail is OK with me and that is not just a lot of rain on your parade.

1xxxxxxxxxx@vm.vonage.com wrote:

Date	: Aug 26 2009 07:10:27 PM
From	: 1xxxxxxxxxx
To	: xxxxxxxxxx (1xxxxxxxxxx)

"The Salvage Tsunami is doing our best to help the community. On Friday and Saturday August 28th and 29th, we will be holding a donation event. Please bring your usable items to 1520 West 75th st., in (Donor's Grove?) or you can always call 1-888-xxx-xxxx for home pick up service. Again that is 1-888-xxx-xxxx for home pick up service. Thank you for supporting the Salvage Tsunami."

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