YouMail subscribers can read their voicemails just like email! No more listening to long-winded voicemails. Instantly scan the text wherever you are to get the message and get down to business!
YouMail offers two kinds of transcription plans:
- Machine-Only
- Human-Edited
The YouMail Personal plans and the YouMail Professional plans provide machine transcriptions, which you can access in-app, via text or email, or through the YouMail website.
How Do Machine Transcriptions Work?
With machine-only transcriptions, your voicemail message is sent through voice-recognition software that automatically transcribes the message into text when you receive it. This won't be perfect, because the automated software doesn't understand context, accents or regional dialects the same way as a human would. The quality of the call can also affect the transcription. You'll find that names of places and people as well as complex words sometimes are not transcribed correctly. But the transcription will be of comparable quality to Siri or Alexa--enough to save you considerable time since you will be reading and not listening to the voicemail.
How Do Human-Edited Transcriptions Work?
When you want the highest quality transcription, you can add human-editing to these any of our plans, with the prices varying by how many messages/month you get. With human-edited transcription plans, your message will be split into pieces and given to different professional transcribers who will listen to the message and transcribe it themselves. The message is split in order to preserve the privacy of your communications. Because a team of transcribers listen to and transcribe the message, human-edited transcriptions take longer to process but will be more accurate than when done by a machine.
Privacy
You do not need to worry about your privacy. YouMail and our transcription partners have taken several steps to ensure your privacy:
- Transcribers only have an audio file. None of your personal information is shared.
- Voicemails are split into pieces and randomized, so it's extremely rare the same transcriber gets more than one of your voicemails.
- All transcribers have signed agreements to preserve privacy with material penalties for violating it, similar to what is used in the medical industry to transcribe medical records.
(Note: Any conditions that affect audio quality will affect the accuracy of your transcription. Background noise, poor signal quality, callers speaking quickly or mumbling, and so forth can affect the quality of your transcription. It’s not magic – though sometimes it’s pretty close.)