I just had a little flashback. When I was an Orange customer many moons ago I remembered that voicemail service that I took for a bit.

It was a female voice that introduced herself to every new caller and remembered them after that, it had speech recognition and stuff!

Is it still going? did it get turned off? does anyone miss it? why didn't it catch on elsewhere.

Have I even got the name right !?

I remember it well. I was on my first contract Everyday 50 . It was great when it worked. She was a little bit temperamental . I think Orange turned it off about 9 years ago now

Come on I'm not that old, other people must remember it!

Don't remember that but a few mobile operators had a craze for speech recognition a few years back.

I remember trying to activate a vodafone mobile through a speech recognition system and dealing with a very bossy "woman" that kept saying I must have spoken my surname wrong because she couldn't recognise it. Took something like 5 goes before she gave up on me and transferred me to a human.

Speech recognition don't work too good

I used Wildfire every day - the voice recognition was awesome for it's time! You could ask it loads of stuff, some serious, some funny.

Orange bought the Wildfire company (USA based), and within 6 months it was closed down, with the promise of something similar.

Still waiting....

i find most speech recognition systems a pain with my scottish accent

I remember wildfire, She worked perfect for me. Orange got rid of the service due to it only understanding the English/American accents, as for indian and pakistani customers it wasnt so good but due to there complaints, Orange pulled it. Now when we ring orange its one of that race that answers the call. Shame they cant bring it back. They would get me back as a customer and my 4 contracts i have with 3 would be ended soon after.

Regards OrangeBox

Thanks for resurrecting a nearly 4 year old thread to tell us that.

On topic I subscribed to wildfire for a short time but found that it actually deterred people from leaving messages so unsubscribed

hell yeah, I remember wildfire. Shiny technology and utterly unfriendly to new callers. People took a bit of time to get used it certainly, but it was v cool

Wildfire:"xxx isn't available right now, but I can take a message for you.first please state your name"
Caller:"Hi its John the builder here I'm just calling to let you know....."
Wildfire:"Thanks. Now please leave your message"
Caller:"err... what? I thought I did. Anyway what I was saying was..."

later that day
Wildfire:"You have a new message from Hi its john the builder here I'm just calling to let you know".
Me:"throw it away"
Wildfire:"I'm sorry I didn't quite catch that..."