Hello everyone,
Blueface are delighted to be the first company in Ireland to provide Visual Voicemail, which is a New Free Feature , accessible from our website and available to all our customers.
This new feature allows our customers to listen to voicemail messages, download them and delete them easily and all these handy features are available directly from our website. The page displays information about each message: time of call, caller number or ID, message duration and have Play and Downloads buttons afterwards. This new feature avoids the hassle of having to go through an automated system (IVR) to perform the same. We’ve all been through the boring: Press 4 for next message, Press 6 to delete … This time is now over.
If your mailbox is almost or completely full (We allow up to 100 messages per mailbox), you’ll see a warning message inviting you to delete some old messages.
The audio player is based on a plug-in piece of software. On most systems this plug-in will be Quick Time Player, for Windows users on Internet Explorer this plug-in will be Windows Media Player (Make sure to have Windows up to date ). If the messages don’t play properly, try to install the latest version of Quick Time Player. It can be downloaded for free on Apple’s website.
Currently, it works on all of the popular platforms and with all major web browsers. We’re improving the software so that it will work on iPhone, Android or Blackberry handsets soon.
We think this new tool is pretty cool, but we’d love to get your feedback on it. Let us know what you think!
Guillaume
Tags: feature, visual voicemail, voicemail
Feature request: compress and convert and use a flash player.
Am I the only one that comments here? Ye must think I’m very critical!
adam /hates plugins
Being constructively critical is great
Thanks a lot for your comments. This blog is still new, so hopefully more people will comment soon.
Flash is as much a plugin as QuickTime or WMP (for IE users on Windows) and it must have about the same reach so that could have been the option.
The trouble with Flash is it requires specific skills that no one has at Blueface. C# with .Net is way more powerful, easy to use and to maintain.
If many people are asking for a Flash version, we’ll take a look though. Wait and see.
Flash would have much higher market share Guillaume. This link comes from quick Google so I don’t know how much credence you should give it, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t somewhat representive. According to these figures, you’d be better off with (awful) Java than QT:
http://www.statowl.com/plugin_overview.php
QuickTime has performed very badly in the MS/IE space in particular, because it’s an Apple technology. Even Windows Media would be better from a stats POV, since it’s bundled with Windows.
Flash would be best though, it’s very widely installed on all major platforms and it handles compression and streaming very, very well.
adam
This method of messaging is brilliant but very limited –
Is it possible that the messages left can be much longer than 2 or 3 minutes, maybe as long as 30 minutes or even up to an hour?
The maximum voicemail message duration is set to 3 minutes on our system at the moment.
We set that based on a statistical analysis: 3 minutes duration covers 99.999% (or something like that) of cases so we’re happy with that.
Something related that could last much longer is the ability to record calls. We’re thinking at allowing this somehow.