Do I need to 'see' my voice mail?

I love telecom products. Whenever a friend needs a new phone, wants to get rid of a home line or just plain - very rarely - wants to talk telco, they call me. They know they can get an answer or opinion of some kind. That is if I am not already on the phone.

But there is one trend I have, up until now, put off. Visual voice mail. Rarely I have seen a technology take off like this one or at least get such ubiquitous coverage. Well done SpinVox, I must say. Particularly for a foreign company.

Yet while I hear and read about it all the time, I have yet to meet one person who uses it. Why, I wonder. Are they just marketing wizards - including buying Rich Tehrani's blog and the 'Visual Voice mail Channel' at TMCNet. (BTW - who needs a Visual Voicemail channel?). Or does the voice mail just not end up that visual?

My sense is that it actually works pretty well and that transcription as whole has a superb future. Think an about an automated application that can decipher which Google key words are being used in a phone call...

Maybe the time has come for me try it. As it is, I get far more email/texts that voice mail, but I can see how I will one day be so lazy that I won't want to have to listen to messages!

Voice mail to text. And to think I used to have beg people just to buy voice mail in the first place. I do love telecom.