Enterprising Canterbury University students invent app that turns voicemails into text

November 5, 2019

It will do away with the need to call a number to listen to your messages.

Tradespeople and the hard of hearing are set to be the early beneficiaries of an app invented by two Canterbury University students that turns voicemail messages on mobile phones into texts.

Seven Sharp reported enterprising students Luke Campbell and Lucy Turner have created the app called 'Vxt'.

Mr Campbell said the most annoying thing about voicemail is how long it takes to make a call to your voicemail inbox.

He said you have to wait for the robot voice to say "please press one", replay the message and take notes. And of you miss some of the phone number to call the person back, you have to start replaying all over again.

"All of those things combined make it absolutely terrible," he said.

Calls to your phone are forwarded to the app system, which uses speech recognition to transcribe them. A notification is then sent to your phone, so you don't have to call the voicemail number directly.

Ms Turner said the app can help a variety of people.

"We're mainly targeting tradies early on. But it's also really helpful for people who are slightly hard of hearing, so that they don't have to go through an audio-only system," she said.

The app can handle Kiwi colloquialisms pretty well, Mr Campbell said.

"The speech recognition software that we use is trained specifically on the Kiwi accent, so it goes pretty well. For most messages it'll transcribe them pretty accurately.

"But every once in a while if someone's got bad cell service, or if they don't have a Kiwi accent, it can come out a little bit funny. And hopefully that's more entertaining than it is annoying. And you can play the message back inside the app anyway," he explained.

Seven Sharp reported the app is free and you get 15 free transcriptions a month, after which you'll have to get a subscription.

It's about $6 for 80 transcriptions and $20 for unlimited transcriptions.

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