Supercharged Voicemail With VoIP

Voicemail is one example of how the old telephone systems have utterly failed to adapt to the new requirements of the digital age. Initially envisioned as a mere extension of the answering machine, voicemail in its traditional form today retains all the limitations of its predecessors. It's locked down to a single device, navigation of voicemails is a pain in the butt, and when you move between devices, you don't have access to the messages which were left for you. They're not even easily accessible. You have to listen to them in serial order one by one thereby forcing you to delete them regularly even when they might be of use in the future.This is one of the areas where VoIP shines and shows how voicemail should be done. In fact, there's no technological reason to treat voicemail any differently from emails. Just like from a conceptual point of view, telephone calls need to be as simple, direct and flexible as emails or chat messages. This makes sense since the Internet is a flexible layer on which VoIP is built. New features are not built into the hardware, but are encoded as and when necessary. Each business can customize VoIP to suit the way it runs rather than the other way around.
Google Voice gives just one example of how easy it is to customize voicemail to suit your needs. Every good SIP provider should allow this malleability as well. The ability to access your voicemail from any device regardless of where it is, the capability to store them for as long as you wish. The ease of navigation between voicemails and even the capability to download them as an mp3 in case you want to preserve it for future reference separately from the rest.
When all this is possible, one has to wonder why the telcos haven't yet managed to come up with a decent portal for users to manage their voicemails online. There's nothing very technologically challenging about it and would be a great help to many individuals. Perhaps they don't want people to get used to flexibility when it comes to phone systems in general. Or they're too lazy to be bothered.
But once more and more individuals start using VoIP - and VoIP is the fastest growing traffic on the Internet - they will start demanding better services, better functionality, and more ease of use. That time is already upon as and we're in the middle of the transition even as you read this.
Bhagwad is an expert consultant on Switching SIP Accounts. He also specializes in Benefits of HD Voice.

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