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.