We've had discussion about voicemail transcription on the call, so I'm
cross-posting this from the asterisk users mailing list.
-Karl

---SNIP---

If you haven't heard, Youmail has recently created a drop-box email
interface for their transcription service.  As of right now, it's free, but
whether free or paid, this may be good news for those on this list who want
to annex transcription functionality to your current mix of voicemail
offerings.

For example:
We (like many) use Asterisk to integrate the voicemail of mobile, legacy
PBX, and 'normal' Asterisk mailboxes to create a unified messaging
interface.  DropBox will allow us to tack on a transcription function with
trivial effort.  Before the DropBox interface you'd have needed to kludge up
something like a drill-down bot to play the message to the youmail service
in baseband audio.

Imagine the efficiency of doing something like this:
Re-relay [sic] the youmail transcription with the addition of a special
single-use URL (or even special Phone number), which, when visited by the
subscriber (or momentarily called with the CallerID of the subscriber) would
trigger a change to the status of that message back at the Asterisk
mothership.  In this way, the end user (if satisfied with the transcription)
could opt out of the need to manually visit the audio interface of their
voicemail box for a properly transcribed message.

We've been impressed with the performance of youmail within the silo of it's
normal customer-facing UI, but we have not yet had a chance to test drive
DropBox as integrated with Asterisk.  We plan to do so shortly after we put
out a few fires and free up some creative bandwidth.

Youmail on getting started with DropBox (FAQ):
http://www.youmail.com/help/view/faq_dropoff_start

-Karl