On the recent trend of transcribing voicemails

Phonetag.com seems to be sweeping the real estate industry by storm. For the uninitiated, when you leave someone a voice mail who subscribes to this service, you hear a voice say “This message will be transcribed by Phonetag.com. Please speak clearly. (Beep).”The  service emails transcriptions of voice mail messages to subscribers as fast as possible. Closed captioned for the “I don’t have the time to actually listen to the message” impaired. (And you know who you are). Sure, this would be great if you can’t take a call in a closing (but hey, when has anyone not taken a call in a closing?) — and I’m sure Phonetag.com is creating jobs — but it needs to calm down a bit and stress quality over quantity.  This is a recent Phonetag transcription of a message I left for a client about an event later in March.  Word for word.  “Hi, How are you?  Thanks so much for the call me invite and see that an (anti?).  Sounds like a (blah?).   Got March 18th in the calendar.  I’m 90% confirmed that the secretary of state, make sure that is not something I’m forgetting on, but it sounds totally great and I got a down for a (Martiny?) Parks.  Just let me know what time it is and we’ll lock it off.  Looking forward to it and have a same task, okay? and I will talk to (Chinel?) if I could.” Now, I’m fairly confident that I speak pretty intelligibly in my voice mail messages, and would invite Phonetag to give itself an overhauling spell check.  It’s a nice step beyond visual voicemail — so long as it make sense.  So says Chinel.