Brighthouse Takes One From The Google Voice Playbook: Enhanced Voicemail

Enhanced Voicemail From Brighthouse

If you are a Brighthouse subscriber in the area you might have noticed they are offering some great new service enhancements to their cable, internet, and phone products.  I was excited to see their most recent addition being Enhanced Voicemail which adds in email and/or text messaging of new voicemails to your Brighthouse phone.  Not only can you listen to the voicemail right within the email itself, it is transcribed as well!  And the transcription is pretty darn good.

This might sound familiar to some of you . . . Google Voice has offered this for some time now.  For the personal home phone user this is a cool convenience, and for the professional user . . . this can be a huge time saver.  For example, our Brighthouse phone line in our house is actually my wife's business line.  She had a couple of options when out.

1. Forward calls to her cell phone
2. To retrieve voicemails, she had to listen to each on the phone and write notes.  
3. Easy Gadget can be used for listening to messages on her laptop but she had to be on that machine and connected to the internet.  

This new voicemail option makes it so so can easily manage her voicemails by seeing the text of the message while out and about on her cell phone as well as listening to the message if the transcription seems confusing.  A much more productive and efficient means of managing voicemails in a timely manner.  Plus with the voicemail being saved as an audio file attached to the email, it can be easily forwarded to others to hear if need be.  

How could they make it even better?  One would be the option to not store the voicemail on their service if forwarded in this manner.  Currently, you have to go and manually delete the message from your phone even if forwarded.  The second would be a linking of contacts to keep them in sync especially if you are using Google Contacts which is easier to link to.  Third would be an Easy Gadget app for mobile phones to manage voicemails.

All in all it's a great addition to their service and definitely beneficial for the persoanl and professional user.