The E-volution of Voicemail

Remember the time that email used to be just for conveying short messages, to be deleted when done reading? For many of us email has become much more than merely a quick communication mechanism. It is not uncommon to find inboxes with 1000s of email messages going back months, if not years. Free email service providers have had to offer larger and larger amounts of storage space to keep up with this trend. Some even offer unlimited space, so that you "never have to throw anything away". As storing email messages rather than deleting them has become more and more feasible and convenient, email inboxes have become repositories for important, and oftentimes even critical information that is not stored anywhere else.

Search technologies have evolved to accommodate the needs of this newly habituated generation of email users. You find such search technologies embedded in email clients, available as add-ons, or in the "search anything on your machine" applications that index your email messages alongside your files. This has served to further reinforce the use of email as a convenient place for leaving information that can be easily and quickly retrieved when required. Some users even deliberately email information to themselves so that it is available in the same trusty repository, accessible from virtually anywhere.

Enough said about email. What about voicemail? Technically, voicemail has been around for a while, but has remained virtually unchanged in terms of the way people use it. One primary impediment to using voicemail as a repository of information is that most voicemail interfaces still only provide sequential access to the message list, which makes navigation prohibitively time consuming. In addition, information inside a voice message is accessed sequentially, that is, by playing the message from start to end. Some amount of efficiency is gained by hunting for specific information by skipping over irrelevant parts of the message.

With the advent of voicemail in VoIP phone services and software such as Skype, there is a great opportunity for voicemail to progress to the next step in its evolution, so to speak. The ability to search through voicemails based on the subject/content of voice messages would allow people to leave information stored in the form of voice messages.

UmeSkype provides the ability to search through your Skype voice mails by date and by caller. We have tried to make it easy for people to speak the queries by saying phrases like: "find voicemails from john last month" or "find voicemails from john on january fourth two thousand six". We hope that this is just a start to what can be done to realize the full potential of voicemail as a knowledge/information repository.