I found a service called GotVoice, which basically calls your [...]]]> A couple of years ago I started looking for a way to get voicemails from my mobile to go into my mailbox. Having the capability to store my voicemails and the limitations on 14 days from my provider was really not acceptable.

I found a service called GotVoice, which basically calls your voicemail number and uses your PIN which you enter when opening your account to log in to the provider voicemail system and retrieve the voicemail. You would then get an e-mail with a link to get to your voicemail.

I stopped using it after several months. Having to visit their site to get my voicemail was not attractive and having GotVoice retrieve my voicemail without the opportunity to listen to it on my phone was also a problem.

While surfing the net recently I came across MessageSling, which basically does the same thing but uses a different approach by using the Conditional Call Forwarding feature cell phones have to redirect voicemail to their service.

By dialing a number code you receive after signing up, the registration of all conditional call forwarding returns success, basically changing the If Busy, the If No Reply and the If Not Reachable conditions.

Its interface resembles Gmail giving the ability to tag voicemails with labels.

On September 1st, MessageSling annouced several new features including “Direct to Message”, allowing you to access each particular message by just dialing a number (no pin or call tree to navigate), as well as Group and Greeting Management allowing to have different greetings for different groups of callers.

**Concatenate wav files**

Copy and paste this [...]]]> Found a really cool website…. http://elvis.naturalvoices.com/demos/index.html
AT&T Text-to-speech engine with natural voices in US English, UK English, Spanish, German and French. Unfortunately its only good for 30 words so I needed a way to concatenate .wav files and then resample them at lower rates.

MORE…

**Concatenate wav files**

Copy and paste this script into a file called catwav in /usr/local/bin. Make it executable with the command chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/catwav.

#!/bin/sh
sox $1 -r 44100 -c 2 -s -w /tmp/$$-1.raw
sox $2 -r 44100 -c 2 -s -w /tmp/$$-2.raw
cat /tmp/$$-1.raw /tmp/$$-2.raw > /tmp/$$.raw
sox -r 44100 -c 2 -s -w /tmp/$$.raw $3
rm /tmp/$$*.raw

The correct syntax is:

catwav file1.wav file2.wav outputfile.wav

**Resample files using sox**

Converting your WAV files to good GSM files is easier than you might think if you have the program Sox installed. From the shell prompt, enter this command:

sox foo.wav -r 8000 foo.gsm resample -ql

and hit the key. In a few moments you will have a new GSM format file in the same directory as the original WAV file. In this example “foo.wav” is your main voice menu audio file in WAV format, and “foo.gsm” is the same file converted to GSM format. If you wanted to, you could use “main-voice-menu.gsm” as the name in place of “foo.gsm”: what matters here is the second file name you use in this command ends in “.gsm”.

If your WAV file was in stereo, add the -c1 option to convert to mono, or the output will sound very strange.

sox foo.wav -r 8000 -c1 foo.gsm resample -ql

You may get better results if you record your WAV file in 16 bit 8000 Hz mono and then run

sox foo.wav foo.gsm

If you have multiple WAV files in one directory and you want to convert them all, use this command:

for a in *.wav; do sox $a -r 8000 -c1 `echo $a|sed -e s/wav//`gsm resample -ql; done