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Last week it seemed we caused quite a stir both in the blogosphere and in some online forumes when we announced that the Sprint-exclusive Palm Pre would be completely compatible with SpinVox Voicemail right out of the box.

As I mentioned in the post, the steps are quite easy – but I’m going to go into them in detail right here, so if you’re reading this and you’ve already PRE-ordered (heh), then bookmark this post now, you’ll need it come June 6th.

Step 1.

If you’re on Sprint* (and not already a SpinVox customer), then first you’ll need to signup for SpinVox Voicemail from our partners, uReach.
uReach will provide you with a 10 digit  Voicemail through SpinVox voicemail number.

Step 2.

From your handset dial *73 and then enter the 10 digit number that UReach provided you with. Press ‘SEND’ and listen for the confirmation tone to indicate the feature has been activated.

PLEASE NOTE:
‘Conditional call forwarding’ needs to be enabled in order for the above codes to work. If you do not have call forwarding enabled then please contact Sprint customer care on 1-877-654-9111. Once connected press ‘5′ for MOBILE INTEGRATION from the IVR. The customer service agent will set you up from there.

Step 3.

That is it. You’re all setup and ready to go. Visible Voicemail for the win

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand…

A prize of stickers + a mini-SpinVox Speech Mobster figure goes to the first person to send me a photo of SpinVox in action on their very own Pre!

The last thing you need to know, and this is very important, the only service SpinVox charges for is SpinVox Voicemail. All other services – including Ping.fm, SpinVox Blog, SpinVox Memo are totally free – or rather, simply the price of a phone call.

*If you’re in the US (or Canada) and not on Sprint, you too can signup to SpinVox Voicemail using the the method above or simply by asking one of our carrier partners, listed below:

US
Alltell $5.99 – Unlimited
Cincinnati Bell $5.99 – Unlimited
Skype $0.25 per conversion

Canada
Rogers $4-$6 Dependent on deal
Telus $7.50 Unlimited or as standard on Pacakge CAD$25 and Smartphone CAD$45

Palm Pre + SpinVox = YES!

The Palm Pre has been a constant source of buzz and news ever since it was first showed off to the blogging world back at CES earlier this year.

So what with the announcement last week that US network Sprint have finally set a release date, the chatter has gone into overdrive over what features and functionality this rather swish little device will arrive with.

Well news is filtering through this morning that the Palm Pre will NOT be shipping with the iPhone-esque ‘Visual Voicemail’ feature that everyone hoped it would.

Both IntoMobile & MobileMag however make the rather intuituve suggestion that the Pre might very well be compatible with SpinVox Voicemail – aka, the far superior* ‘Visible Voicemail‘.

Back in February, at Mobile World Congress, yours truly was given a fantasically in-depth walk through (I took some nice photos), of the handset in question and, as I did back then, I can again – exclusively reveal that the Palm Pre will be *completely* SpinVox ready out of the box.

You simply just have to enter in your usual SpinVox activation code and you’ll be away!

Just like the Treo before it, the Palm Pre is going to be able to use the only voice to text service available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German – with the sophistication to deal with individual accents and regional variations such as US, Canadian, Australian and South African English.

How’s that for a slice of fried gold?

*Don’t just take my word for it, read the comments here  – “Visual vs Visible Voicemail“

So I disappear off on my hols for ten days and all hell breaks loose!
(in a good way, of course)

It seems that in my absence there has been such a flurry of awesome activities, that it looks like I’m going to be blogging every single day this week!
Bonkers.
Starting off, let’s get groovy with something fresh off the virtual press with SpinVox’s own Dr Tony Robinson making a rather informative appearance on this week’s episode of the BBC’s flashship technology programme; Click.

If you’ve never heard of Dr Tony, well he’s our brain-in-resident over heading up our Advanced Speech Group over in Cambridge.
The man knows his stuff and if you’re still unsure of his uber-creds, jump over to read the full story and find out what else he had to say on ‘A sound start to speech tech‘

“The Most Exciting iPhone App Update EVER!!”

With James Whatley away for a week on vacation I, Matt Heath, am blogging in his place. As you’d expect, we’re a hard-working crew of speech to text zealots here at SpinVox Towers but sometimes ever we’re amazed at the reaction we get out there. We’ve just been named as being behind the “most exciting iPhone app update ever” – with two exclamation marks, no less!!

Yep, Dan C at whatsoniphone was first out of the traps to try out the latest version of nFinity’s Quick Voice PRO which has just been released on App Store at 99 cents. Quick Voice PRO is the latest version of the award-winning voice recorder that instantly became a Top 100 product in Apple’s App Store when it was released in July 2008.

What’s special is that, with the new enhancement, Quick Voice PRO users will be able use their iPhones for the first time to record voice messages which will be automatically converted to text by SpinVox and sent to the email inbox of the user’s choice.

The reason is that the folks at nFinity were able to launch this product is that they have been working with SpinVox API which we pre-announced back in February for developer registration and that already has over 400 developers signed up.

Cool, huh? Dan certainly thinks so read him here

Revisiting a topic from early last week, ‘RiddlerMike‘ has just discovered the wonders of SpinVox Memo.
Mike writes:

“I’m having a bit of a slow day today… – …so I took the opportunity of being sat at my desk to try out SpinVox (http://www.spinvox.com) – and put simply, it’s brilliant. I can see so many uses for this (they’re primary ‘business’ is converting your voicemail into text and forwarding it to your mobile, which I can see a stack of uses for), but today was just about playing around with it.”

And play around with it he did…

Why not jump over and see how Mike got on with his experiments?

I did… and I left him a cheeky little SpinVox Hacker tip while I was there too.

Shh..