Charles F. Moreira

Last afternoon, I received an SMS from Kash, as I had just turned onto busy Jalan Ampang and there was no way I could have stopped to reply, till I had got home.

Worse still is when my mobile phone rings just when I’m in the midst of the trickiest of traffic conditions, where the slightest distraction could result in me crashing into the car in front which braked unexpectedly. So under such situations, I usually just let it ring and call or SMS back later.

Besides being in the midst of a meeting, these are some of the times when I wish I had a secretary to answer the call and take down the message.

Sure yes! I have voicemail but I have to pay each time I call in to retrieve my messages and with my operator, there’s that annoying call back to my phone from the voice mail system to say tell me I’ve got a missed call, usually also while I’m unable to take it.

Well local developer, Stellarnet Sdn Bhd (www.stellarnet.biz) in Petaling Jaya soft-launched that “secretary” called FunVoiceMail at Mobility Carnival 2007 in Kuala Lumpur last month, which would help people us – well for now those of us with Symbian 60 and 80 phones only -- out of such awkward phone situations.

Its vice-president of business development, Virginia Entizne said they’d be releasing versions running on Symbian UIQ and Windows Mobile later.
You can configure FunVoiceMail to respond to different callers differently, with standard or customised greetings, based on general, group of individual profiles created from contacts in your phone book.

However, you must first buy a FunVoiceMail starter pack from participating phone shops for RM49. Call 03-79826933 for a list of retailers.

Follow instructions at the back of the card to download and install FunVoiceMail on your phone and once you’re a customer, you can download additional greetings and share your experiences on the FunVoiceMail website at www.funvoicemail.net.

It comes with two preloaded greetings, lets you record your own greeting in compact AMR format to save space or you can download over 50 greetings in English, Bahasa Melayu, Cantonese, Mandarin or Tamil from FunVoiceMail. You can download from Net through your phone’s WAP browser or PC’s Web browser.

You can also use your favourite MP3 songs as greetings but Stellarnet recommends to convert them to the AMR format to save valuable space on your phone, with tools like Miksoft Mobile AMR or Mobile Media Converter downloadable from www.funvoicemail.net/fun_greetings.asp#. If you don’t see the download links, click on the tip on MP3 and AMR files.  

You can then configure FunVoiceMail to answer calls and play the configured greeting telling them you are busy and will return their call or tell them to call you back. Fun, indeed.

It can also automatically send a pre-configured SMS to selected callers, like, “Can’t talk now, please SMS me,” to your friends and colleagues,” “Get lost” to a boyfriend or girlfriend whom you’re trying to get rid of, or “Sorry honey, I’m in a meeting, call you back later,” to your spouse.

It can also be configured to reject certain calls, like from the a loan shark or to ignore them and just let your phone ring without doing anything or to let callers leave a voice message, which it records and stores as an AMR file on your phone, for you to play back later, forward via MMS to others or send to your PC via Bluetooth.

While RM49 may seem a lot, it’s a one-time purchase and just think of how much you are saving over the years on calling back your voice mailbox to listen to the messages, especially while you’re roaming overseas, though you would be paying roaming charges for the few minutes it took for a caller to leave a message.

Moreover, you can keep voice messages for as long as you want, without them being deleted after a week as it happens with my operator at least. With FunVoiceMail, you can keep all those precious voice messages for posterity.

You also get to participate in forums and later, you may even be able to upload your recordings to the FunVoiceMail site, though this feature is still under construction.

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