Hollywood stars set the trend when they flocked to a service that enabled them to retrieve and delete their voicemails via email. It is regarded as totally uncool to be caught checking your voicemail by dialing in. Enter SpinVox, with its speech recognition capabilities, voicexml conversion and integration into the carriers existing voicemail systems. SpinVox has made listening to voicemail a thing of the past. This is a core offering for the iPhone and has proven to be a hit amongst its customers. Even MSFT caught on to the trend and released its Office Communications Server 2007 with a voicemail feature that displays the meta data of the call in your Outlook Inbox, so at least you know who called and when.

Besides making calling into voicemail so last season, I believe there is an even brighter future ahead for services like SpinVox. Fighting voice spam! With VoIP and SIP applications taking centre stage in the enterprise, our IP phone systems will be vulnerable to the same spam we get in our inbox. Imagine, dialing into your voicemail and having a 100 messages? Some real and others unsolicited voice ads for Viagra?

Another byproduct of SpinVox is solving the archiving issue. I can now store my voicemail as long as I have space available in my inbox. Even further, companies can audit and search calls for compliance needs.

And of course, how could I forget……ADVERTISING! Ads could be inserted into the email message based on the context of the voicemail. These ads could be highly targeted and effective. Privacy issues would have to be addressed, but I suspect, the folks at SpinVox have experience in navigating these waters.