Is there any way to expedite voicemail (i.e. override carry-provided service)?

[phucheneh]

I'm unable to answer my phone all the time. I'm often not even near it when it rings.

And I'm terrible about checking voicemail. Most people who know me will not leave it; they'll just call back (or wait on me) or send a text. But it gets left for business purposes by those I don't know (or barely know).

It's kind of a PITA to call the number, wait for the stupid voice to say the same old crap, then scan through messages. So I was wondering if I could disable my carrier's voice mailbox (set it to 'infini-ring') and simply have an app on my phone pick up and record messages. This would also allow me to have a longer chance to answer the phone (it's just not long enough; most would stay on the line at least 50% longer if it didn't go to voicemail).

I googled 'android voicemail app' and whatnot, and I seem to just be finding services and stuff that don't really do anything but relocate the problem (and cost money).

Is there something out there that will allow my phone itself to manage voicemail and record/store it locally? Phone is rooted and running stock ICS.

 

[bearxor]

Which carrier?

Have you looked at YouMail? It doesn't work on TMobile though, I believe.

 

[Anubis]

google voice will do exactly what you want

 

[phucheneh]

Virgin Mobile.

The thing was that I'm looking for something that shouldn't require any specific carrier provisions...I just want my phone to 'pick up' after a certain amount of ringing and record the voicemail itself. This may be a fundamental impossibility: I dunno. Just seems like it should be possible, and if it is, I would think someone has made a program for it.

edit: it looks like Google Voice is just another 'call-forwarding' type of service. Am I missing something?

 

[zerogear]

Google Voice -> check messages via voice.google.com - You can setup conditional forwarding services from different groups/users as well.

It's a call forwarding/voice mail/sms/call blocker service.

 

[pm]

I did what Zerogear recommended. I used the transcription capability of Google Voice to send the voicemails transcribed as text to me as text messages. They weren't always completely coherent (ie. people's names were often transcribed totally incorrectly) but I almost always could read enough of the message to get the gist of what the person was trying to say.

I followed instructions that looked like these to set it up:
http://forums.att.com/t5/Account-Features/Google-Voice-voicemail-set-up/td-p/1970069

 

[Gooberlx2]

google voice will do exactly what you want

:thumbsup: ...provided you can setup conditional call forwarding on your service. Definitely recommended though.

 

[bearxor]

Youmail isn't really carrier specific, but I believe tmobile doesn't allow the forwarding like other carriers. It basically does be same thing that the fowarding above does for google voice, but the iPhone app for youmail is a lot more full featured than the google voice app, whic really requires you to log in to the website to access a lot of its more advanced features that you can access in-app with youmail.

 

[phucheneh]

Google seems to only be yielding two answers about VM and call forwarding. Either it doesn't have it, or it costs money. Yes, I know, someone will say 'just call and ask.' But I don't use VM for their customer service. As it is terrible.

I'm guessing what I want simply doesn't exist, or else I don't see why all these forwarding-based programs would appear to be all that's around.

The only possible programming hiccup I can think of is having your phone play a message upon picking up, rather than just turning the mic on. Otherwise, it seems like a no-brainer, since call recording apps are out there, as are ones for answering and/or rejecting calls. And speech-to-text is built in, if so desired.

 

[gus6464]

I switched to Verizon recently and on Android they make you pay for VVM so I just created a google voice number, put in the code it told me on the phone and now I have native VVM integration on my phone for free.

 

[Markbnj]

I switched to Verizon recently and on Android they make you pay for VVM so I just created a google voice number, put in the code it told me on the phone and now I have native VVM integration on my phone for free.

Yeah, VVM works very well on 'droid, but they do make you pay a couple of bucks a month for it. I'll have to give this a try.

 

[Argo]

+1 to VVM. Well worth a few bucks per month, IMO.