| Voicemail: How to Save Time Listening to Your Messages
The Problem
Does this ever happen to you? You’re listening to a voicemail message that a friend or client or colleague left on your cell or landline, and you wish you could get to the important part of what they’re saying more quickly and with less effort.
Many YouTube videos let you see closed captions, display a transcript, and even speed up (or slow down) playback. Wouldn’t it be great if your voicemail could also do things like that? The good news: Many modern voicemail systems can show transcripts that you can read on any of your mobile devices or your computer, and they can also send those transcripts and audio files to you via email and text. The bad news: It may not be obvious how to activate and use those features, and the quality of the transcripts will vary. Example: Comcast/Xfinity landline voicemail Whether you access it on your computer or on a mobile device, Xfinity’s digital landline voicemail interface on http://www.xfinity.com lets you listen to your messages in any order, download them as audio files, delete them, and more. Under voicemail settings, in the Voicemail Notifications section you’ll find four very useful options:
- Enable voice transcription: If you turn this on, the Xfinity voicemail playback web page will also show a transcript for each message.
- Email Notifications: Turning this on (and entering your email address) will send you emails when each new voicemail has arrived, along with the date, time, caller ID, etc.
- Display the voicemail transcript in the email notification: Turning this on will add the transcript to the body of those emails. If the transcript is clear and understandable, then you can skip listening to the message.
- Attach the voicemail to the email notification: Turning this on will also attach a file containing the actual audio of the message to those emails, which can be helpful if the transcript isn’t clear.
I recommend turning on all four of these. Note that the Xfinity website doesn’t have a specific option to send voicemail-related notifications via text messages, nor does its website include any playback speed controls, only Play and Pause. Other cell and landline companies According to my research, most major cell and landline companies include similar voicemail features to Comcast (email or text notifications, transcripts, audio files) in their digital voice accounts, including AT&T, Cox, Spectrum, T-mobile, and Verizon. Each carrier has a somewhat different way to activate and use those features. On the other hand, accounts with simpler voice systems may not have those features, especially with basic “flip-phone” cell phones or legacy landlines that are “analog” or copper-based. It’s best to ask your carrier (or look in your voicemail settings, or google it) to be sure. Note that the voicemail-related text messages that some companies can send will probably include basic information (called ID data, date and time, and duration), but they may only include a partial transcript and they likely won’t include an audio file at all. Other reasons to turn on these features If your carrier offers these features, here are some additional situations where getting an email or text with the contents of your voicemail can be very helpful:
- You’re unable to use your phone service to access your voicemail, e.g., your battery died, you can’t get a signal, you experience a service outage, etc. In those situations you’ll still get those voicemail-related emails, even though your phone is not working.
- You arrange to move your cell or landline phone service to a new company. Before the transition begins, some callers might leave you voicemails, which would arrive at the old company. If you don’t retrieve them right away, after the transition (when your old account closes) those messages will get deleted. If you had set up your account at the old company to email those voicemails to you, copies of them are probably already in your email Inbox.
Note that these features won’t help if your voice mailbox gets full, or if you haven’t set up your voice mailbox yet, since both of those prevent callers from leaving you a message. Things that can affect the quality of voicemail transcripts Like any dictation service that tries to turn spoken audio into text, here are some of the things that can affect the quality of the transcripts:
- Ambient noise
- How far away the caller is from their microphone
- Whether they’re using speakerphone or a headset
- Accents and dialects
- Very quiet or fast talkers
- Unusual vocabulary
Playback speed None of the companies I researched offered built-in voicemail playback speed controls. On the other hand, if you’ve got the audio files for voicemail messages on your computer, you could play them using audio software that gives you the ability to speed up (or slow down) the playback, including Audacity, VLC Media Player, Windows Media Player, QuickTime Player (Macintosh), and more. That may take a little more effort on your part, but it is often easier than having to play a message multiple times to make out what the caller said. The ultimate voicemail time-saver Here’s a completely different approach to saving time listening to voicemail: Prevent anyone from leaving you a message at all. Method #1: Let your voice mailbox become full on its own, or record enough of your own “placeholder” messages to intentionally fill it up. Many years ago this worked well, but carriers now auto-delete messages after anywhere from 30 days to 2 years, depending on the company, so you will probably have to periodically refill your mailbox. Method #2: Deactivate your voicemail by asking your landline or cell company to “Please remove the voicemail feature from the provisioning account.” Most companies let you do this, but you’ll probably need second-level customer support. A number of things may later re-activate your voicemail, including changes to your plan, upgrading your phone, and especially moving to a new company. Method #3: Use Conditional Call Forwarding to send any calls that you don’t answer to another number that’s configured to never record messages, which you can create with free services like Google Voice and others. Since each of these methods may not remain in place long-term, I recommend periodically checking to see whether they’re still in effect by calling your line from another number and seeing if you can leave a message. Where to go from here As always, if any of my advice seems too difficult to follow, I recommend that you find someone you know and trust who can help you. In the searches below, replace “X” with the name of your cell or landline company, e.g., “Xfinity,” “Verizon,” “T-mobile,” “Spectrum,” etc.
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