YouMail, the voicemail service that lets you record personalized voicemail greetings for assigned friends (and will also hang up on your exes for you), is rolling out a new feature for its site. The latest option is voice-to-text transcription that will convert your voicemails into text. You'll have the option of receiving the transcribed voicemail messages via email or on your mobile phone.
Such transcription capabilities are among the core features of other services out there, such as Simulscribe, and similar features are quickly being layered into other phone-related services, including Jajah's VoIP call options. But as Mark has pointed out in some of his more recent posts on the phone industry, offering up free features can be quite lucrative. And YouMail is offering this transcription service for free (at least with its beta program).
A while back, the YouMail's CEO dropped by Mashable Conversations to chat a bit about the industry and overall business model as a whole. Download the MP3 file directly here.
You can check out YouMail here.