I was recently referred to CallWave by ReviewMe.com. Although I always give my personal views on everything I review, this is a Sponsored Post.

I've written about Callwave on MacnCell before. Then it was about their Virtual Voicemail Widget, but today Callwave has reached out to me to let you know about their Mac OS X native Visual Voicemail client for its call answering hub service. Visual Voicemail is like having an answering machine in the Dock of your Mac, but all the calls are being stored on the Internet, much like your email is stored on a mail server.

Visual Voicemail is an application, not a widget. One of my complaints about the original widget was that it was very basic. It functioned quite well and gave you access to your mobile phone's voice mail, but it didn't integrate with the information your Mac already knew. For instance, the widget pulled the caller's name from the phone network's caller ID. Visual Voicemail is smarter and dips into your Mac's Address Book to expose that information--telling you who's calling you and even pulling up their Address Book photo.

The Visual Voicemail window's main listing of messages looks a lot like the Mail.app on the iPhone, where you see a list of senders' names, with a brief excerpt of their message. You see, with this service your audio voicemails are not only recorded, they're transcribed into text. Not only is this useful at a glance, but it can be invaluable if you're trying to find a voicemail with a bit of information--the application lets you search for text from all your messages. Until now, you couldn't do that with voicemail, because, well, it was all audio. Presumably, this is done server side and downloaded to the Mac client, sent via a text message to your phone, or in an email.

From the message window, Visual Voicemail allows you to respond to your messages in a number of ways. You can text the person back, and the application smartly allows you to select a mobile phone for that contact, again pulling from your Address Book information. If you have an email address for that person in your Address Book, you have that option as well. Or you can call them. When you select "Reply by Phone," CallWave's telephone service calls your phone and then the other person and patches you together--kind of like a three-way call--or if you're a high-powered executive, like having your assistant make your call for you.

If you're away from your Mac but have access to the Internet, you can log into CallWave's online message portal that gives you access to your messages, recorded and transcribed. There is also a Contacts feature in the message portal, but at the moment I'm unclear if information here is automatically populated from your Mac Address Book or if it has to be entered some other way.

Of course, you can call your voicemail as usual with CallWave's service. However, if you have an iPhone, your regular Visual Voicemail phone feature won't work because that's only accessible through your mobile provider. However, with CallWave's service you will receive text message with transcriptions and emails with attached audio of your voicemail messages. A useful trade-off.

Currently, CallWave is offering Virtual Voicemail to Mac users as a free trial, and if that's like their other free trials, it will last 7 days. I'm not sure of the specifics on the charges for the Mac version of the software and service, however, it's probably competitive with their other offerings, which have various levels of services, monthly payment plans, and annual subscription discounts.