Quick App: YouView 47
Now that gDial Pro is no longer in the picture, there's a real void in the native visual voicemail application space for webOS. Sure, Google Voice has a fantastic web interface, but it'll never compare to an actual on-device application. Until better GV support comes to webOS, YouView ($3.99 in the Catalog) - which was plugged on Palm's official blog in its homebrew days - should satisfy (or even convince you to switch) your on-device visual voicemail needs.
The YouMail service is free after purchasing the app, and offers voicemail management from the phone and the online interface at youmail.com. The free service plan does not include transcriptions, which isn't a big deal - it's not like the transcriptions offered by Google Voice are actually usable. For various monthly fees YouMail does offer transcription of the first minute of or of a voicemail, and those transcripts are actually accurate (shocker!).
The user interface is excellent, and even in its current beta form (0.5.21 as of this writing), the program runs great. Unlike gDial Pro, YouMail can link into Synergy, and there's a myriad of greeting options - from smart greetings that greet callers by name to case specific greetings for blocked and unknown numbers - that go into making the use of this program a treat.
47 Comments
first!
All I gotta say... Douchebag!
what's not great is sound comes through the speaker only. Not good in a loud place.
Or when listening to "critical" voice mails from your "special someone" at work in a quiet place.
I'm actually considering getting this app. I was hoping for the Pre to come w/ Visual Voicemail, but sadly it didn't.
I got two questions though. It might be a little silly, but does this only work w/ Google Voice or can I use it as my normal voicemail. Also, what if I have a headset connected, will it still play through speaker?
No the app uses a services call YouMail LINK. However Google Voice can be also be used with some additional setup.
Messages will play out the speaker. Messages in fact are treated just like a music file is. If your headset supports A2DP then you can use it. We don't know when Palm will give developers access to the ear-piece, but we are cooking up a lil work around for the Homebrew scene as we speak (not sure if it will work but we shall see).
I've been using this for a long time and love it. This is one feature (the only feature) that I missed on my Instinct. Happy to have it on my Pre. Worth the money!
I second that! I upgraded from instinct to pre. and I don't regret a thing! It made me buy this app right away!
I have been using this app and it is one of my favorites!!! It will be even greater when they get the few bugs worked out of linking it to synergy. The price of the app is totally worth what you get for free after purchase, the smart greetings are amazing!
The link for Google Voice integration setup instructions.
I love this app. It was the first app I paid for. It will be better once they get the kinks worked out with Synergy. It has a habbit of truncating the phone numbers of contacts you add.
All in all a good program to have
Loved the functionality when I used the beta version. Only thing I didn't like was that you had to set up forwarding for it to work. Would rather have the local (or carrier based) visual VM like my Instinct had.
When gDial died I started using http://www.google.com/voice/m and it works much better than any app that's currently out there.
the http://www.google.com/voice/m is now no longer working properly since the webOS 1.4 (or hadn't you heard). The numbers on any contact's details page (the page that shows the contact's alternate contact numbers and info) now gets cut off, so u can only reach them. It sucks because prior to this issue I would have had to agree with you.
ok, I was one of the guys who reported about the end of development on gDial Pro, but let's get this straight: it's not dead! You may not be able to download it, but I still have it on my pre, and it still works. I had to turn off the web dial feature, but ut still downloads my history, vm transcriptions, and text messages just fine. Not being able to send texts sucks, but I can do that from the gv mobile website.
the biggest problem I have with gv's mobile web interface is that i'm locked into the contacts I have in only one of my 3 gmail accounts, so that's why I keep gdial going on my phone.
Sorry for the off-topic post. Just wanted to get that off my chest.
Totally agree. This app is worth the money. I hated my voicemail until I downloaded this app. I never wanted to check it and often ignored it making quite a few callers unhappy with me. Now I know exactly what voicemails I want to return without having to sort through the junk ones. I also agree that an ear piece feature would be great.
I thought this app linked with google voice as well?
Real User Review:
Let me first start off by saying everyone who wants to customize voicemail needs this application.
2nd: if your a techie like me.. for years you went with that standard "hi you have reached mr corporate scumbag whipping boy.. i am not at my desk right now.. please leave a message" I have always had to have a professional greeting for work and jobs and programmers calling me in the middle of the night and such.. while my blue collar friends get to have all the funny wacked out messages because their boss thinks its funny or they are just un professional and jobless.. So yeah i always wanted to record some good greetings like i did back in the day when i was 19 in college. so in rolls youmail and all of a sudden its on. I can customize a greeting for each person. I even set it up for day/night greetings.
When central blood bank calls for a donation, i set it to go straight to my voicemail and they hear "hi central blood bank you have reached Jason, i can't donate at this time but when i can i will surely give you a call, no need to leave a message as i already know how precious blood is but can't donate at this time. Thanks for your call"
it blew the central blood bank caller out of the water.. they were all mind f*cked like.. umm hello is this a message
For this one nagging dood that always calls me for burnt games i set him up to go straight to the old "this phone has been disconnected" voicemail.
Just the ability to do these things are awesome.. NOw i will get to the bad or not so useful...
As i find the website awesome, the app for the palm pre is somewhat not very useful. I can get all the info from my voicemails or from the net.. so i really don't need this thing all that much. But still its nice to be able to set up the pic contacts..
another negative is that this works so well because your voicemail is listened to by an actual person and then sent to you. Some of you say who cares, but i kinda worry at times about that.. So i never used the translation yet.
btw when my girl calls its a voicemail of me like "hunny im so sorry i know i forgot and i will call you write back" she freakin hates it. lol.
I give this app 4/5 but not really the app, just the service in general. The app itself is cool but not a must have, the service is a must have.
Good review, you should post this stuff up in the forums as well.
"your voicemail is listened to by an actual person and then sent to you."
This would be a total deal breaker for their native transcription, they really listen to them? No way will I do that.
What about now that the app integrates with Google Voice, does it supply the admittedly horrible GV transcription?
YouView will provide GV's attempt at transcription.
Regarding people listening to msg's, no one person gets the full message as it's divided up and its done anonamously. Also the machine takes the first crack and based on a confidence score determines if it needs further review.
This App is not an official YouMail app, though, right? Their website says they have free apps for Android, Blackberry, and iPhone. What gives?
We are officially endorsed by YouMail and have an ongoing relation with them and their engineering team.
JHof80 who is unaffiliated with us did a great job explaining this:
Quote:
One, Youmail themselves made the app for the BB. From what I can tell, they had no intention of doing the same for webOS, so Arcticus stepped in and developed a third-party app that has all the functionality. It's still not entirely finished, so yeah, maybe there's a few bugs. When Youmail makes the app themselves, they can do it for free because they get compensated for their time by people paying for the transcription and other extra features. Arcticus, having no affiliation with Youmail, doesn't see any of that money, and so chose to charge a small fee for his effort. If you don't like it, you can try the Google Voice version by a different developer, entitled "Visual Voicemail." But this is clearly a better app, and I have no problem paying for it.
I was just reading this forum thread about Youview:
http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre/234353-youview-now-supports-google...
And I saw in that thread that some people are saying that Youview now works with googlevoice, and that Youview will even let you view transcriptions from Googlevoice.
But I wasn't sure about whether this really works and what exactly people were saying. It is sort of a confusing thread.
I am curious to know this as well. The dev is posting here, perhaps they will comment.
YouView does work with Google Voice. I posted a link to the setup instructions earlier. The basic jist of how it works is you tell GV to email your vm's to YouMail and the rest is magic :)
I switched to YouMail about a month ago. The app/service itself is great, my only complaint is that the volume is WAY too low. It only plays messages through the speaker, I think that is a limitation of the SDK.
It is a limitation of Palm's SDK... with this limitation some will like the way it is setup currently (including myself, although I would prefer it not play through the speaker) others will not and think its too loud/quite.
Hated this app.
bought for pre and pixi in house. Awesome, easy to use and setup. Only complaint is notifications of messages seem to take forever from the call itself.... like 5 mins...
The app runs in the background and checks every 5 min for new voicemails.
The YouView app is developing very nicely, when the 1.4 fixes to Synergy contact syncing are worked into YouView, it will get that much better.
The YouMail visual voice mail system is head and shoulders above what Sprint offers, and according to the YouMail website many carriers use YouMail as their standard voice mail system.
I have no need for transcription services, so, the service is free for me. I, like many others are praying for more volume from the YouView app. It is far too low, both through the speaker, or when it is routed to a bluetooth headset, (I'm using the BlueAnt Q1, and even at full volume, it is barely audible.
The ability to customize greetings and to choose which order one listens to voice mails is priceless.
A top five app for webOS.
An easy workaround for the speaker only playback from the phone app is to just turn on text notification. The text has the youmail phone number you call and you can listen to your messages the old fashioned way, though the earpiece, like you would in carrier voice mail. Granted, it shouldn't be necessary, but oh well, I'm sure this will be one of the first tweaks fixed in the next release.
BTW, does the synergy issue screw up the contacts function of the phone, or just not work real well in the app itself? i haven't been brave enough to try it yet.
The synergy works with some and reeks havoc for others (like creating duplicate contacts). We are working with both YouMail and Palm Engineering. Palm is putting allot of thought into how Synergy should work and improvements that can be made. However like all things Palm there is no timeline or roadmap. On the YouMail side, we are the first to really exploit the contacts feature so they are finding code bugs on their side of the fence and we are working with them to test and fix.
Love the app and the updates are always nice improvements.
Is it just me, or it seems like when I try to add contacts, it never works... Besides that, I love the app!
I have same problem !
Me too. I have tried to bring in contacts from Thunderbird, as Tab-delimited like they want and it says the file is empty of contacts.
So, it somewhat diminishes the usefulness of the program because the messages only say what any Caller Id would say, and not the names that are in my contacts.
I wish I could program the default voice-mail button to call youmail :(
I am having trouble downloading the message to my phone. I hit the download to phone and nothing happens. Does anyone know where I can find the messages?
nevermind
This program is great. One of my biggest needs is some kind of "Call Filtering" for unwanted callers. While this program gives you lots of options once you get a "visual" voicemail, its the service that makes this worth it (youmail.com main site). You can specify down to a single number what the caller will hear as a recording. The pre-recorded "discard" voicemails are great. Perfect voicemail management as far as I am concerned. Let's hope the arrivals of notifications and voicemails is quick. Now, if YouMail can add in a feature to the actual Palm Pre software: The ability to block the phone from ringing in the first place on an "unwanted" caller from a list! Basically make this software a complete call management application. Options to alert when a call was blocked and by who.....things likt that. I do not comment much on apps, but this app deserves one so far.
Very impressed. Much Better than the Google Voice App.
But, Like another user commented, I would like to have the default Audio setting come through the earpiece and not the speaker.
Other than that... Great Job, Keep it up!
I liked the app, but as of late (i think since the OS update) when i start the app on my Pre, it immediately goes into a "syncing 1 of 1 contacts" mode, and never finishes, making the app useless for now. i can still access my voicemails through the web/messaging, but, yada yada yada. I'm sure they'll be able to fix this soon (i hope).
Thank you
Bob
The picture associated with the article is very appropriate. App keeps spinning 'loading' with 0 seconds of 0 seconds. Won't retrieve the message and play it. VERY BETA. Shouldn't be charing for it in the official App Catalog yet. Feel I wasted good money and don't think after spending the $$ on it I should have to provide input on how to fix the developers problems. If you want donations to assist in development fine, I'll dontate via homebrew. If I buy from the official App Catalog (something that isn't refernced as BETA I might add), I expect it to work!
Back to provide an update. After using for several days I'll admit I'm impressed with the app. Haven't experienced the 'loading' error recently. Also found the developer to be quite active interacting with users on the support forum. Consequently, I feel much more satisfied with my purchase.
So, I just purchased this app and have been trying to install it properly on my phone, but am running into a snag. Every time I get to the step to setup my phone it warns me that it will now "prompt you to dial a code to setup your carrier to use YouMail". It then switches over to my phone and dials the number *289095106169, which doesn't even ring, it just beeps then hangs up. I am then prompted to enter my phone number again and a code. What exactly does this do? Am I not supposed to receive a code from the phone call from them? I am trying to understand how to set this up so I can see when I get a voicemail and use all of my options. Please help. Any help is greatly appreciated here.
Thanks :o)