YouMail Inc. has expanded its voicemail service offering with the addition of opt-in voicemail transcription.

This opt-in transcription service provides YouMail customers with human transcribed voicemail or automated transcriptions via SMS or email.

"YouMail wants to provide an extremely compelling mobile voicemail service, and transcription is both something our users have clamored for, but also something that extends YouMail's visual voicemail to give people not only the choice of which message to play in which order, but also whether to listen or to read the message," said Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail, Irvine, CA.

Benefits of the new YouMail transcription service include low price points, the ability to select human or automated transcriptions.

Users are able to provide feedback or correct transcriptions they receive to improve transcriptions of future voicemail.

"This service addresses three big challenges for people for whom voicemail matters," Mr. Quilici said. "One is that it's often much faster to read a voicemail than to listen to it, so we save busy people time.

"The second is that it's often more convenient to read a voicemail rather than listen it, like when you're in a meeting you don't want to interrupt or an event like a dinner or a loud concert," he said.

"The last is that it allows people to truly treat voicemail like email -- you get a voicemail, are emailed a transcription, and can just forward that on if someone else is supposed to deal with it."

The service comes in three different plans.

Read-It Text, for $3.99 a month, is a transcription sent as a single SMS. It is designed for users without smartphones to quickly decide what a voicemail is about and whether or not to retrieve it.

This option provides 50 transcribed messages per month.

The Read-It Select package, for $6.99 a month, is transcriptions delivered as an email. It is designed for users with smartphones to avoid dialing voicemail to receive messages.

This option also provides 50 transcribed messages per month.

Read-It Text Unlimited is for $9.99 a transcription that fits in a single SMS. It is designed for users without smartphones who receive a lot of voicemail.

This option provides unlimited transcribed SMS messages per month.

Read-It Select Unlimited, for $17.99, is a transcription delivered as an email. It is designed for users with smartphones who receive a lot of voicemail. This option provides unlimited transcribed email messages per month.

"In the premium services, we don't currently have ads in the messages that deliver transcriptions in order to devote the most real estate to the content of the transcriptions," Mr. Quilici said.

"However, these users first get a text message notifying them they got a voicemail -- and then the transcription follows as a separate message a few minutes later," he said.

"There is an opportunity for a brief ad in the first text message, and that can be targeted based on the city/state, wireless carrier, and type of device, like BlackBerry Pearl."

In addition to the new transcription service, YouMail has also partnered with the creators of the original Crazy Calls answering machine messages to provide users with another fun way to customize their mobile voicemail greetings.

There are several hundred premium greetings that will be available for purchase by YouMail users for a nominal fee of $1.99 per greeting.

Combined with YouMail's personal greetings feature, this lets users entertain family and friends while maintaining a professional appearance to other callers.

"Up until a year or so ago, voicemail was basically unchanged for 20 years and was generally in the category of an annoyance," Mr. Quilici said.

"Now with things like visual voicemail on the iPhone and services like YouMail, you're starting to see a key fraction of the public experience in a much more productive and fun voicemail experience," he said.

"In five years time we should see these sorts of services -- visual voicemail, transcription and so on -- truly become mainstream," he said.