Yesterday, SpinVox - the 'Big Daddy' of voice to text (GigaOm's words, not mine) - announced a partnership with Skype. It's a great move for the UK-based company, and proves the real standing they have as leaders in the voice-to-text industry. However, as positive as the response has been ('Voice 2.0' being one of the recurring quotes), the real story has surrounded Skype's pricing of the voicemail to text service.
The logistics of the deal are fairly straightforward, with SpinVox providing optional voicemail to text conversion for all Skype Voicemail users from now on. This will allow all subscribers to the service to receive their voicemails as SMS messages from Skype should they wish.
At the moment, you don't pay to receive an email notification, but there's no conversion of the message within the alert as per the normal SpinVox service - which is a little disappointing. There's also no integration with IM, which I would have liked to have seen.
If someone goes offline during a Skype conversation, you can choose to send them your IM message as an SMS. So why shouldn't you be able to recieve an IM alert if someone has sent you a voicemail that's already been converted into text?
Anyway, you get charged a standard SMS rate (according to Skype) if you just receive a notification of a voicemail via text, but each conversion costs €0.20/£0.17/$0.25 on top of this. Additional SMS charges also apply depending on the length of the voicemail message. It basically starts adding up.
Now, my point to the whole 'that's incredibly expensive' is that honestly, how many voicemails does the average users receive per day? 1? 2? From my perspective, its hardly going to break the bank. But either way, users have a choice to set a limit on the number of voicemail conversions received per day, or to receive messages from people in their contact list alone. Both of these restrictions will help users to manage the spend of their Skype credit.
Although it wouldn't bother me, the fact is that other voice to text services provide a bundle conversion package. Obviously this won't include the Skype functionality or accuracy of SpinVox, but it's still got some customers hot under the collar. The way the service is priced is obviously an attempt by Skype to create an additional revenue stream, but like some of the other Skype calling charges, it feels a little unnecessary.
One user commented on the GigaOm piece I've referred to above, saying that it would be much easier to call Skype to pick up your voicemail. But doesn't that wholly defeat the object of having 'visible voicemail'? It's about ease of use and convenience rather than cost in my opinion.
More interesting to me is the fact that there seems to be some discrepancies in the services that Skype vs. SpinVox offer. For instance, Skype will convert the voicemails via SpinVox from four languages; English, French, German and Spanish. But SpinVox can (apparently) do six; covering Italian and Portuguese additionally. I'm sure that Skype is available in these languages as well, so it makes me wonder if this is just the first stage in a larger roll out.
Perhaps we'll see a closer connection to Nokia's deal with Skype or the 3 Skypephone later in the year, with an integrated service becoming clearer as the relationship develops.
One to keep an eye on for sure.