Listening to voicemails is a huge waste of time. That’s why apps that transcribe your voicemail to text are a godsend. The new Yap Voicemail app is now available for the iPhone. You route your voicemails through Yap, which launched a few years ago at TechCrunch 40 as a speech-to-SMS app. It transcribes them for you using only speech-to-text technology (no humans), which allows it to offer the service for free (with ads at the bottom).

The transcriptions are not perfect—it mistook “Leena” for “Nina” and “drafts” for “trust” in one message, but Yap gets enough of the words right to figure out what the message is about. And you can always play the message in the app to listen to exactly what was said. Every time you get a message, a notification pops up with the name of the caller and the beginning of the message. Since it is completely automated, the message appears almost immediately after it is left on your voicemail, just like a text message. You can respond via email, SMS, or a phone call right from the app.

Here is one typical message that Yap transcribed for me today from a PR person:

I am sorry to leave this message. I know you probably hate voice mail but this one is important. Otherwise, I wouldn’t leave it to get to the point. I know you’re probably getting inundated with pitches around Google TV from all the partners in obviously Google but hoping that there’s a way to include . . .

You get the idea. I saved 42 seconds not having to listen to that. Thank you, Yap!

Yap is not first to this market. The ability to read your voicemails is one of the killer features of Google Voice, for instance. While the official Google Voice app is not available on the iPhone, it is expected to be approved shortly. And third-party Google Voice apps are already available. Note that Google Voice offers other features besides voicemail-to-text transcriptions, but with Yap you can keep your own phone number.

And then there’s Ribbit Mobile, which does pretty much the exact same thing as Yap and is an excellent app, but won’t be free after its beta period. Ribbit’s voicemail transcription is powered by PhoneTag, which augments its speech-to-text engine with human proofreaders and claims to be the most accurate of all the services. I’ve only tried the Yap iPhone app for a day and received a half dozen messages, so I can’t really tell which one is more accurate. But it seems to be at least as good as Google Voice, maybe better. The set-up is real easy, and it’s free. Definitely worth a try.

Ever since Ribbit Mobile launched, I’ve been using it to forward my calls to Skype when I am at my computer and transcribe all of my voicemails, the text of which are then sent to me via email. It’s similar to Google Voice (which Mike uses), except you can use your existing mobile number. So I was pretty excited to hear that Ribbit Mobile now has an iPhone app which was just approved today (iTunes link).

I was also pretty surprised. Because Apple wouldn’t approve the iPhone app for Google Voice, which led to an FCC investigation last summer. The main reason Apple gave was because Google Voice substituted its own dialer for the iPhone’s native dialer, and this changed one of the iPhone’s core user interfaces.

Well, suffice it to say that Ribbit Mobile does not attempt to take over any of the iPhone’s telephone functions. Calls are placed through the iPhone’s regular dialer. And you don’t even receive calls through the app. Just like with Ribbit Mobile, the calls are placed through the mobile phone you link up to your Ribbit account.

Instead, the app is more of a voicemail manager. You can see all of your transcribed voicemails, and click them to read each one, or press the play button to hear them. For each voicemail, you have the option to call back (through the iPhone dialer and AT&T), respond via SMS or email, or even record a voicemail response, which you send as an MP3 attached to an email. The app also lets you create a To-Call list to remind yourself which voicemails to respond to directly later on.

Ribbit Mobile’s iPhone app is fine as far as it goes, but I kind of just want it to take over the entire phone function of the iPhone, which is the part of my iPhone I use the least anyway. But if it did that, it probably would never have seen the light of day.

Angstro, a 2008 TechCrunch50 startup, launched with a product that socialized the content on the web by tapping into your social graph. At the Real-Time CrunchUp today the startup is launching Knx.to, a real-time search engine capability and API that looks up most recent social information about any of your friends, from their LinkedIn profile to their Flickr account to their Facebook profile.

In order to understand Knx.to’s virtue, it’s best to see the technology implemented in an application. Ribbit Mobile, a Google Voice competitor and cloud-based VoIP telephony service, recently launched with the capability of integrating any calls to a contact with your social networks, which was powered by Knx.to.

To enable the application, you sign into your Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr accounts via oAuth, Facebook Connect and more. When a friend calls you (or you call a friend), the technology will automatically scan all of your social networks, identify if the contact is a friend, and will pull all the most recent photos, Tweets, status updates, and more into its search pane. The idea is to give a social context to all of your contacts, which is definitely useful information for both professional and personal contacts.

Knx.to’s is officially launching its API to allow a variety of applications to tap into this new way for adding additional social information to contacts. It’s a innovative idea and something that many applications, whether it be email or VoiP/phone based technologies.

The startup also has a standalone consumer facing search engine that lets users easily tap into the most recent information about a friend or contact from one platform. After logging into your accounts via oAuth, Facebook Connect and more, you simply type in a friend’s name and the real-time results of your friends’ latest acitivity on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Yahoo Mail will show up. Additional social media sites will be added in the future.

One issues with tapping into social networks for this information is security. But Knx.to’s founder, Rohit Khare, says that all of the results and information are stored in your browser, and don’t break any social network’s terms of agreements. Similar in some ways to email plug-in Xobni, Knx.to adds another layer to your contact list which in the age of social media, is very useful.

First, there was Google Voice. And all was good, and not so good. But it showed that there is a better way to manage voicemails than to listen to 15 in a row just to get to the one you care about.

Now, there is an alternative to Google Voice called Ribbit Mobile. And it too is very good. Ribbit Mobile is in private beta, but the first 500 people to sign up with the invite code “techcrunch” will jump to the front of the line.

Ribbit Mobile starts out by taking over your cell phone’s voicemail. You give it permission to do this by entering some codes it presents to you during the sign-up process. So Ribbit Mobile lets you use your existing number, something Google Voice also recently added as an option. Once you set up your voicemail, and record a new greeting message, you can get started.

All voicemails will now get routed to Ribbit Mobile and stored there. Every time you get a voicemail, it appears in your Ribbit inbox, where it can be played on your computer. It is also transcribed (using Phonetag/Simulscribe’s speech-to-text engine). And it is pretty accurate. It was even able to understand and transcribe a message left by my three-year-old son. Every transcribed voicemail also gets sent to you as an email.

So there is really no need to listen to a voicemail again. But you can retrieve them the normal way, by calling an assigned number you can save to your phone. The one drawback I found is that I no longer see the notification on my phone showing how many voicemails I have.

Ribbit also lets you route calls to any number, including Skype and Ribbit’s own Java phone which rings in your browser so you can take calls on your computer. It does not yet, however, let you assign different actions to different callers (put my wife through to my cell, put anyone not in my contacts through to voicemail).

When you are online, you can also sign into various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr) and see recent Tweets, status messages, and photos from the person who is calling. It’s very Xobni-like in that way.

Soon there will be an iPhone app, and the ability to send “shouts” to Ribbit Mobile members. A shout is a voicemail that doesn’t actually ring the person’s phone, it just goes straight to voicemail, where it is then transcribed and sent along as a regular text message. Why talk, when you can shout?

Ribbit Mobile will launch with a free basic package, and then start charging between $10 and $30 a month for more services, such as human transcription. Ribbit was acquired by British Telecom last year for $105 million, so it’s not going anywhere.

One day, we’ll get a service like Ribbit Mobile or Google Voice that actually is built into our phones.

For those of you who don’t think voicemail is counterproductive, there is a new app on Facebook called Voicetag that lets you send voicemail messages to individuals or groups. This is not the first such app on Facebook (see Voicemail or TringMe), but it works with regular phones and incorporates SMS messages.

The app is very simple. You select a Facebook contact you want to leave a voice message for (or you can set up group aliases), and add an optional text message. Then, instead of using a computer microphone, you enter the number where you are at and Voicetag calls you. After leaving your message, the recipient gets a notification via Facebook and can play the Voicetag from his or her browser. You can also leave messages to groups from your cell phone by texting Voicetag. It will then call back your cell phone and you can leave a message.  The service is free for now.

Voicetag was built by a startup called Ringful to showcase its voice app APIs. (It hopes to compete with BT’s Ribbit and Gizmo).  Voicetag’s future feature list includes:

• The ability to not only record but also deliver voice messages to phones, in addition to the online voice Inbox we have today.
• The ability for the message recipient to interact with the message via touch tone when they hear the message on the phone (imagine that you can send out a voice poll on “where do we want to eat tonight? punch 1 for XYZ; punch 2 for ABC”, and get the votes back in text message!)
• The ability to start ad hoc group / conference calls among facebook friends.
• The ability to call your Facebook friend on the phone no matter where she is in the world, and no matter how many times she has changed her phone number since you last talked.

Like Skype, you pay really low rates for calls to regular phones, while PC calls are free. GizmoCall supports video calls as well. And one nice feature is that it can turn any phone number into a link, like this test number.

Gizmo has opened up its APIs for developers to add calling features to their apps compare to the APIs from Ribbit or Ringful). GizmoCall phones are also embeddable:

https://www.gizmocall.com/gizmocall.swf?ver=3

Ribbit has raised just $13 million from Allegis Capital, KPG Ventures and Alsop Louie Ventures. That makes this exit nearly a ten-bagger just two and a half years after launch.

BT will keep the Ribbit team intact in Silicon Valley and use the acquisition to try to win mind share among developers. Ribbit is a platform for creating voice-based applications over the Internet. BT will now be able to run those applications over its backbone network at a lower cost than Ribbit was able to lease those lines (calls to landline and mobile phones need to go over regular telephone lines at some point). Ribbit is an attractive way for BT to ramp up software revenues. And its soft switch technology (a software-based telephone switch) could start to pop up throughout BT’s network, where it would add more flexibility and create cost savings.

Whether or not developers want to rush into the arms of a telco is another question. By becoming part of BT, Ribbit will no longer be seen as a neutral player. And developers may fear getting locked into a relationship with one large telephone company, especially if they are trying to create apps to displace telephone companies in general. BT and Ribbit will have to overcome that fear by being more open than anyone else and offering the best platform for creating voice-enabled apps. Skype and Google’s GrandCentral are other potential competitors.

Update: I just spoke with Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs and JP Rangaswami, a managing director at BT. Griggs says:

At the end of the day we are trying to make BT into a software company. BT has never acquired a pre-revenue company before.

Rangaswami emphasizes that what BT is buying is the team, the technology, and access to developers in Silicon Valley (Ribbit has already attracted about 5,000 to its platform). He adds:

It is very unusual for us to even be making a play across the pond. It is not an experiment.

We wanted to up the ante in the global communications platform trade. We could have been an AT&T and provide pipes. We could have been an Apple and innovate around the pipes. Or we could have been a Google and serve ads around the pipes. But as we envisioned the world of open-based platforms, it had to be global and scale digitally, so it had to be about software.

Below is an Elevator Pitch from Ribbit founders Ted Griggs and Crick Waters explaining what Ribbit does:

The strange part is this – while Ribbit executives are denying the acquisition to the press, they’ve simultaneously been (quite happily) telling all their friends that BT has acquired them for $55 million, says a source who’s heard the story.

BT plans to use the Ribbit platform to build out a GrandCentral competitor, they’ve said. GrandCentral, a service that manages all of your phone services, was acquired by Google in July 2007 for $50 million. Since the acquisition, however, GrandCentral has gone nowhere – no new features and intermittent down time are the only GrandCentral milestones over the last year.

From past experience, this suggests a deal is in the process of closing but isn’t legally done yet, which gives executives the ability to deny acquisition rumors. But like most leaks, the company getting bought just can’t not tell their friends (loosely defined) all about it. Confidentially, of course.

Ribbit has raised $13 million in capital.

Tomorrow BroadSoft, a VoIP software provider for telecom companies that’s been around since 1998, will officially announce a platform for integrating voice into web applications. The company’s new offering, BroadSoft Xtended, will enable developers to add voice capabilities to their applications and then showcase these applications in a centralized directory called the Xtended Marketplace.

Comparisons can be drawn most easily to Ribbit, which late last year debuted its own platform for integrating voice into web apps; the company even went so far as to call itself “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company.” The idea of integrating VoIP into web apps, of course, is not restricted to these two companies: Jangl, Jaxtr, and TringMe all let you add simple call buttons to your website, for example. These aren’t exactly platforms, however – for another one of these, you’d have to look at something like MyVox, Lypp, or BT’s CallFlow, which was announced very recently itself.

Like Ribbit, BroadSoft doesn’t yet have many applications built on its platform and available for consumers – as of today just an Internet Explorer toolbar called Assistant Xtended and a Salesforce “unified connector”, although we’re told a dozen applications will be available tomorrow. Among these will be a Facebook application called ClicktoMessage that will allow users to place calls from profile pages. Except for this Facebook app, users who place calls using apps built on top of BroadSoft will need to be customers of one of the company’s 300 service providers, which include 7 of the top 10 carriers in the US (such as Verizon and Sprint).

One thing that’s not clear is how BroadSoft plans to make money from its platform. Developers will be able to use it for free and license their creations to service providers and end users for a price. This scheme contrasts with Ribbit’s plan to charge developers per call, and MyVox’s system of making money off voice advertisements.

Let’s start with the communications part. Amphibian is a Web-based phone that acts as a command center for all of your incoming and outgoing calls, no matter what number people use. It effectively gives you a universal phone number. Whether someone calls your home, office, or cell phone, or even rings you on Skype, Google Talk, or MSN Messenger, you can answer all the calls on Amphibian or route them to wherever is most convenient for you. “The codename is Amphibian,” explains Crick, “because it lives equally well outside the Web as inside the Web.” During a live demo, Ted called Crick’s cell phone, and Crick answered it on Amphibian. In the middle of the call, he transferred it back to his cell, which rang, and he picked up the conversation where he left off.

At its heart, Amphibian is a Flash phone that can call other Web-based voice clients or regular phones. It is built on Adobe Flex, so an AIR version will be available as well that can sit on your desktop without your browser having to be open to the Amphibian Web page all the time. And since it is Flash, the phone can look like anything, even a chalkboard, and you will be able to embed it into other sites, like your Facebook page or your iGoogle page. (In the screen shots left and right, the black rectangle is the same working Ribbit phone in two different Web settings).

Amphibian lets you synchronize your contacts with Plaxo, and will soon support other services. You can also see someone’s associated feeds from Flickr, YouTube, Google News, LinkedIn, or his blog while you are talking to him. Think of it as Caller ID 2.0. There is also a “call rescue” feature that, if you speed dial Amphibian right after a call goes to voicemail, it lets you listen in as the other person is leaving the message and interrupt to save the call. For some reason, this feature is particularly popular with women, who either lose their phones in their purses all the time or simply like to screen their calls.

Amphibian will be free for Internet calls, but there will be a charge for calls to regular phones along the lines of $5 a month for four hours of talk-time or $15 a month for unlimited calls in the U.S. (the company is still working out the pricing). Developers will be able to add additional services, browsable in a market area of the site, for which they can charge extra or give away for free. For instance, one of Ribbit’s partners is SimulScribe, which offers a visual voicemail service starting at $10 a month that transcribes your voicemails so you can read them like e-mails. (SimulScribe also just settled a patent suit related to this technology). Another developer created a ShoutCast app for blogs that lets readers leave voice-comments or call in at pre-set times. Stay tuned for beta invites.

How badly do you want to be able to call your friends directly from your Facebook profile, without actually picking up your phone? A new technology company by the name of Ribbit Corp. hopes your answer to that question was anything other than “not at all,” since it showed off out a service earlier today that does just that. The technology aims to embed telephony in the software you use every day, to the point where it can be a mere Flash applet.

While Web-based telephony isn’t actually new, Ribbit is trying to set it apart from the other providers (Vonage and Skype) by trying to be open like Android. No, I don’t know, specifically, what that means, but buzzwords are always fun to throw around.

How and what consumer services Ribbit integrates with is all we care about, followed closely by how much it wants to charge. As it stands, I’m OK with not being able to call my friends from Facebook, especially since they’re all pretty much on AIM 24/7.

Ribbit unveils Web telephone development platform [Reuters]

“If you were to invent a phone company today,” asks CEO Ted Griggs, “what would it look like?” It wouldn’t be just cheap calls over the Web or a one-trick startup built around a single feature like click-to-call buttons. No, says Griggs, who founded Junction, a VoIP software company he merged with Summa Four and sold to Cisco in the late 1990s. It would be a complete end-to-end environment where developers who know nothing about telephony could plug into and quickly create Web-based phone applications. Ribbit recently closed a $10 million B round led by Allegis Capital, with KPG Ventures participating. The company also raised $3 million (the amount was previously undisclosed) from Alsop Louie Partners in October, 2006.

Today’s launch is a developer launch, not a consumer launch (that will come later in the first quarter of 2008). It is releasing a more robust version of its APIs for its private developer beta, which is open to any programmer. Already, about 600 developers have built Ribbit apps under certain restrictions (they are not allowed to go live on the Web until early next year). These apps range from an Adobe AIR iPhone that can make calls from your computer to a Flash phone with a chalkboard interface to a browser-based phone that works inside Salesforce.com (see screen shot below).

All of these phones can call other Web-based phones (including Skype), VoIP phones, or regular landline and mobile phones. Ribbit handles the calls and other voice-related services (call logs, voice messages, speech-to-text transcription,contact imports, directories, provisioning, billing, security, authentication) and provides the APIs to developers, who build their apps with Adobe’s Flex development tools. (Ribbit does not support Ajax apps because Ajax does not let you access the computer’s microphone, says Griggs, but he might consider extending support to Silverlight, which does). Ribbit will create its own consumer and enterprise phone apps, but it will also host a marketplace where consumers and businesses can find (and buy) Ribbit apps.

For the most part, Ribbit plans on charging for its calls. “There is a company a week that tries to avoid paying for the call. We are not doing that,” says Crick Waters, senior vice president of strategy. It is free to play with the API’s and develop a Ribbit phone application, but once it goes into production and actual calls begin, Ribbit will start charging. Pricing will start at $30 a month for 20 simultaneous sessions, or seats (for, say, call center reps logged into the application making and receiving calls), plus per-minute fees to the regular phone network. (Internet calls are free). The developer can then choose to charge its customers or provide it for free, and make up the cost in other ways. There probably will be free consumer apps from both Ribbit and its developers, but the business opportunity here is for enterprise voice applications that can be charged for. Instead of developing a custom call-center application for $250,000, for instance, an entrepreneur could build the same thing for much less on Ribbit and charge, say, $5 a month per customer service rep (with Ribbit taking $1.50).

At its core, Ribbit has built a telephone switch in software, known as a soft switch. It works just like a switch made by Lucent or Nortel. Except that it is software running on hosted Linux servers. Ribbit’s “class 5″ switch has been tested in Lucent’s labs and passed with flying colors—meaning it is as reliable as any telco switch, Griggs assures me. Ribbit’s soft switch can send calls to regular phones, mobiles, Voice-over-IP, Voice-over-IM, and Web pages. It supports many voice protocols (SIP, Skype, Google Talk’s XMPP). Through its APIs, Ribbit will give developers access to all the functionality of its phone switch. “In the old days,” says Griggs, “it was a hardware box Lucent built talking to a hardware box that Nortel built. Today, there are a lot of clients people are using.” Want to create a unified messaging service that follows you wherever you are, even ringing on your IM or in your browser? No problem.

Sending phone calls over the Web is not what makes Ribbit interesting, though. What makes it interesting is that it offers a way to create voice apps in a familiar Web application development environment that can easily be linked to other Web apps. Voice is just a feature of the Web, and Ribbit recognizes that. The Ribbit phone created as a demo for Salesforce.com, for instance, will not only let sales people make calls to prospects directly from the browser-based CRM application. It will also log the call. And in the next release, it will be able to record portions of a call at a click of the button and transcribe it (Ribbit uses speech-to-text technology from SimulScribe). Other developers have used the same transcription functionality to create phone apps that let people leave voice messages on blogs or on people’s Facebook FunWalls that then get turned into text comments. In the future you might call a friend and hear, “Press 1 to leave a private message, Press 2 to leave a message on my FunWall.” Ribbit has big ambitions. If it can deliver on half of them, it just might become Silicon Valley’s first phone company.

Here is a screen shot of the Salesforce app (click to enlarge):

One developer, Joe Johnston, used Adobe AIR and Ribbit to create an Adobe AIR iPhone that looks just like a regular iPhone and can actually make calls from your desktop. This is not a Flash phone because it opens up as a separate Adobe AIR app in your browser. But it gives you a good sense of the types of interfaces that are possible, and that we may be seeing a lot more of soon. Here is a video of the phone making a call that shows how it works (and a slicker demo of the same app can be found here):