VoIP voicemail service differs considerably from the analog landline voicemail you may currently be used to.
In this article we explain how VoIP voicemail works and discuss the advantages of this service compared to older landline voicemail.
What is VoIP Voicemail?
You are likely already aware that VoIP is digital and utilizes your Internet for phone service rather than traditional analog landlines. All of your audio is sent digitally rather than a traditional analog signal and for this reason it opens up a lot of features that were not possible with analog signals.
Older landline voicemail answering machines had to be located in your home or business and would activate when your phone was not answered. In past times the analog signal would be stored on a cassette though eventually this did move to local digital storage.
With VoIP, the voicemail is stored digitally in the cloud so there is no need to have a voicemail system in your home. When you need to access voicemails with VoIP you simply listen to the message from the cloud using your Internet.
Note that the cloud servers will still ping your phone with a Message Waiting Indicator (MWI) so your phone will display that a voicemail message is waiting for you. You can also listen to the message from your phone, but in reality it's actually playing it from the servers in the cloud.
What are the Advantages of VoIP Voicemail?
We will now look at the main advantages for residential and business customers using VoIP for their voicemail.
Cloud Based Voicemail
All voicemail greetings and voicemail messages are stored digitally in the cloud by your phone service provider. This means you need no equipment at your home or business for storing voicemails, it is all handled by your provider.
This has the added advantage that if you lose power your voicemail will still be supported as it is handled by the provider and they usually have multiple levels of redundancy to ensure high service availability. For older landlines if you lost power you typically lost your voicemail system too.
Access Voicemail Anywhere
The digital nature of your calls and voicemails and the fact they are stored in the cloud means you can easily access them from anywhere at anytime. We will touch on some additional ways you can access them below but typically you can also log into a secure Web portal and then listen to your voicemail messages, in addition to downloading and deleting them too. Providing you have an Internet connection you can use your Web portal no matter where you are on the planet. For landline technology the voicemail typically stayed on your answering machine and you had to physically be there to listen to your messages.
Voicemail to Email
Most VoIP providers offer voicemail to email service and it is typically free of charge. Whenever you receive a voicemail you can configure it to send you an email with the voicemail attached as a WAV or MP3 file. This is an extremely useful feature and ensures you always have easy access to your voicemail messages, even when on vacation.
Speech to Text Transcription
Many providers now offer speech to text transcription services for your voicemail messages. Often this is a premium service though some providers do offer it free of charge. Powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is utilized for this feature and it constantly learns and adapts to messages so over time it learns to handle different languages and dialects.
This feature is often married up with the voicemail to email service and in addition to receiving an audio attachment in your email inbox it will also show the transcribed message. If you are in a meeting or in another place where you cannot easily listen to a voicemail, this service proves to be very useful as you can simply read the message. It is never completely perfect but usually good enough to determine the reason for the call.
Recently some providers have also offered this as an SMS option where the voicemail can be transcribed and texted over SMS rather than email.
Multiple Voicemail Greetings
The cloud also stores your voicemail greetings and this can be useful for those that frequently update their greeting messages. Instead of recording a new greeting each holiday you can record multiple greetings, have them stored in the cloud and simply select which one should be active. Now you only need to record your thansgiving and other holiday greetings once and simply switch between them as needed.
For those interested we do have an article on professional voicemail greeting tips. This is mainly aimed at Companies looking to record their business voicemail message greetings.
Conclusions
In this article we discussed how VoIP voicemail service differs from landline voicemail and stated the most important benefits of using digital voicemail rather than analog.
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