American Voicemail prompts - Can we change them?

Posts: 71 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jul 19, 2005 Posts: 71

My wife hates the voicemail prompts.

Any chance of having a choice of voices or at least something along the lines of those on BT 1571?

Regards,

Paul

Posts: 13 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 13

Yes have to agree English prompts in the voicemail would be good. Especaily as the voice refers to pressing pound which refers to hash in English but 99% of people will not have a clue what pound is.

Posts: 5 · New Forum Member Joined: Aug 26, 2005 Posts: 5

I'm getting hassle from managers about this pound sign thing now which is pretty annoying, is this on a list of "to be fixed"? It's not a feature request, it's a bug report!

It is frustrating that we've signed up to use this for a few business lines, and now our customers are going to think we sound oh so professional being asked to press a pound key and having no clue what that is.....

The American accents are a little annoying, but we can live with that if the actual information is accurate....

Posts: 71 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jul 19, 2005 Posts: 71

g4hlf wrote:

My wife hates the voicemail prompts.

Any chance of having a choice of voices or at least something along the lines of those on BT 1571?

Regards,

Paul

Vonage, comment please!

Posts: 76 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Oct 17, 2005 Posts: 76

Personally, I think what is worse is that callers leaving a message hear a prompt asking them to press the 'pound' key once they have left their message. In the worst case it might put someone off leaving a message because they don't know what the pound key is.

My guess is that Vonage will implement UK prompts one day. Perhaps its just a question of having enough customers here to justify the expense.

Posts: 9 · New Forum Member Joined: Nov 07, 2005 Posts: 9

Can't you change the US voice in the prompts and record your own prompts message without reference to pressing the "pound" button"?

Posts: 76 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Oct 17, 2005 Posts: 76

Well its now happened. A caller to my line told me later that they didn't leave a message because some American women was asking them to do something they didn't understand.... Sort this out Vonage. Its a bug.

Posts: 28 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Oct 18, 2005 Posts: 28

It's Vonage's fault that people don't know what the pound sign is??

Posts: 47 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jun 03, 2005 Posts: 47

pianotech wrote:

It's Vonage's fault that people don't know what the pound sign is??

In the UK, the pound sign is £.

In the US, when they refer to the pound sign they mean #.

Now, I've never seen £ on a keypad, only #, which in the UK is "hash" (or sometimes referred to as "square"). For a service in the UK they should, as others have said, use UK English, not American English.

(Having said that, I know quite a few people who wouldn't bother pressing the # button after leaving a message - wonder if the message still goes through?).

Posts: 76 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Oct 17, 2005 Posts: 76

The message does still go through if you just hang up but my issue is that you confuse people when you ask them (in a foreign accent) to press a button they've never heard of when in fact all they are doing is calling a friend down the road!

I work for a speech recognition company and interestingly, any product we make for the Canadian market is legally required to include Canadian French. Shame we don't have a law like that here! ha ha. Not that I know Canadian French either! Smile

Seriously though, this HAS to be high priority surely?

Personally I'd be happy if we could just turn off the womans voice completely. I'll happily add a 'press the hash key' bit of dialogue to the end of my own message.