The problem with this for me is my voicemail is now so full of spam messages from numbers I don't answer or block that I can't ever get any useful messages if there are any. A lot of the time my inbox remains full and I can't actually receive new voicemails. It's just gotten to the point where the new voicemail icon has become a permanent fixture on my notification bar I totally ignore.
I've never heard of this before. Unfortunately after checking it out, it looks like my carrier only offers it for iphones. This does look like a handy feature though.
Google Voice will transcribe any VMs and send them as a text. The transcription is good enough to know if it's someone you need to call back or add their number to your block list.
It can't transcribe the Chinese scam calls that I get 5x daily, though. I've taken to answering every call again recently because my family has some health stuff going on. Otherwise, I have to physically listen to every voicemail to ensure that I didn't miss an important call because someone in the hospital had a thick accent or any other benign software issue related to NLP problems.
I wholly disagree. The system as it works today is miles better than a circular buffer. People trying to leave new voicemails are informed that there is no more room and thus they know that if it is important they should try calling back later.
If it just deleted old entries then it's possible someone left an important message and assume you'll hear it but then it just gets silently deleted.
Imagine if PC storage devices worked this way, it'd be chaos.
Use the 'this number not in use' tones (http://www.k3pgp.org/telezap.htm) as I described in my reply to 'SomeHacker44' above. That cuts out many (most?) garbage voicemails.
There's two I get regularly. One is from people pretending to be the Canada Revenue Agency. The other is a message in Cantonese, that according to my coworker who gets them too, is from someone pretending to be from the Chinese embassy basically saying the same thing as the fake CRA one. That you owe money and a lawsuit is being prepared under your name, without actually mentioning your name. The one from the 'CRA' is almost comical. It sounds like something a child would say. I've talked to the government enough to know how they talk. They also don't use odd voice concealing effects typically.
I actually called the number the CRA one left back once and a person with a French accent answered pretending to be from the CRA. I just said if they called my number again I was going to report them to the rcmp and then hung up. It stopped for a few months after that. I'm assuming if it was actually Canada revenue, they would have called back. All I was getting were the Cantonese ones. The CRA ones only started again recently.
