I signed up for Ribbit's beta voice service back in January. However, I never received an invitation to try the service. And, then, they were purchased by British Telecom (BT) in late July. They seem to be making noises again (pun intended). So, I headed over to...

Ribbit Mobile

...sign up for their beta service again. I don't expect to hear anything back from them given their previous track record. But, who knows? So, why am I interested in a service that looks like will have a $30 per month fee associated with it (based on their "Try it Free - A $30/month value" web message)? To be honest, I'm not quite sure why I found it interesting. It appears to essentially duplicate services already offered by the free Google Voice (voicemail on your existing phone number, text transcription of voice mail, easy management of voicemail.

Note, if you look at Ribbit's pricing plans, you'll see they do plan to have a free offering with no business grade transcription service as well as a $10 per month plan with a limit of 40 transcriptions.

Some people (many?) might find an accurate "business grade" voicemail transcription service worth $10 or $30 per month instead of using Google Voice's free but error prone transcription service.