Listen to your e-mail: Tata Cellular unveils VoiceMe

HYDERABAD: Tata Cellular has introduced a service dubbed as VoiceMe, which

would be able to give voice to the e-mails. The service is going to transform

the way people communicate on their cellular phones. The service is being

introduced by the cellular operation in the state of Andhra Pradesh, in

association with Speech and Software Technologies India Ltd. (SSTIL), a part of

Tata group, based at Chennai.

VoiceMe converts text messages of any size sent to a cellular phone, either

from a cellular phone or a computer, into voice messages and plays them over a

user's cellular phone. Long messages, even with text or HTML attachments, can be

send over VoiceMe.

Commenting on the launch of this service Tata Cellular Ltd. COO SK

Subramanian said, that this IVR (Interactive Voice Response) based service is

available to all post paid subscribers of Tata Cellular across the state of

Andhra Pradesh. Subscribers are pre-registered for the service one need not sign

up separately for this. As an introductory offer the company is providing the

service free of cost as of now, but after about one month the service would be

charged as per the airtime fee.

Subscribers can access the service by dialing 229898 to send a message to

friends in their own voice. "The messages are carried in wave file format

and the recipients of the message can listen to them either on their computers

or on their cellular phones. A user can send a voice message of upto 2-minute

that is roughly about 240 words long message. Apart from this a user can also

receive responses in voice or text format," he explained.

To receive a message on the VoiceMe service, the Tata cellular subscriber

should communicate their VoiceMe Ids. The cellular number itself serves as the

VoiceMe id such as cellnumber@voiceme.cc once the id is communicated, messages

can be received from any email account across the world. There is no length of

messages that can be received onto the VoiceMe ID and the arrival of the new

mails in the VoiceMe inbox will be intimidated via SMS on the cell phone.

Subscribers need no passwords to access VoiceMe from their cellular phones, a

facility available in VoiceMe captures the cellular number of the user and

provides access. But at the same time a user will have to enter a password to

access VoiceMe from the web. Every user is allotted an inbox with a capacity of

7 MB.