"You have no new messages"

It’s a simple idea – as the best ideas often are – but they thought of it first, and now they’re reaping the rewards.

Spinvox takes your voice mail messages, converts them into text and sends them to you as an SMS message.

According to research (conducted, admittedly, by Spinvox), calls which result in a voicemail message are only returned 20 per cent of the time, but when they’re converted to text, the figure rises to 87 per cent.

This is, naturally, of interest to operators, one of whose options for raising revenue is to make more connections.

On average, people leave voicemails of between 35 and 40 seconds, which, once the “umms” and “aahs” are taken out, fit neatly into two text messages.

Spinvox, which is based in Maidenhead, says it strives to generate the “meaningful text equivalent” of a voicemail message. “But we’re not the taste or grammar police,” the company’s marketing director, James Robins, adds.

Spinvox says it has already has contracts with nine operators, including Vodafone in the UK, and that by the end of the year it will have 28 contracts. It does not sell its service direct to consumers, but rather provides it to networks which offer it as an “add on” to a regular monthly plan.

The company has 60 patents either approved or pending, most connected with its voice-recognition software which can already translate four languages – French, German, English and Spanish – and has to be “voice independent.”

“We’re hoping to do for voicemail what BlackBerry did for e-mail,” Mr Robins said.

Apple has made much of the ‘visual voicemail’ service on its iPhone, but that function only lists voicemails in an easy-to-use format – so you don’t have to play back all your messages to find just one – rather than transcribing them, Spinvox points out.