Visual voice mail is great if you want to know who sent a message

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before you go through the trouble of dialing your voice mail service to hear it. But what if you don’t have to dial at all?

That is the essence of new time saving services from Google, A&T and PhoneTag, among others. You get a text message or an e-mail message showing you who sent the message and exactly what they said.

Or close to it. Depending on the accuracy of the service, you could think a friendly voice mail is a kiss-off, or that a business deadline is hours further away than it actually is. The services generally score high marks for accuracy, and at least two of them let you click on the message and listen.

So depending on how much voice mail you get, and how much you hate slogging through it, the services can be a bargain — especially if you can get a Google Voice account, because unlike AT&T ($10 monthly) or PhoneTag ($30 monthly), it’s free. Google Voice is an invitation-only service at the moment, so you must either scour your social network for friends who have it (and remaining invitations to pass along) or sign up with Google and hope for a response. Among other things, the service gives you a single phone number that will ring through to any of your phones.

More to the point, you can also tell your cellphone to hand off voice mail responsibilities to Google, assuming your carrier is one of the eight networks on Google’s list.

You just type your phone number onto the web page, wait for an automated call from Google, then type in a two-digit pass code. After that, you dial another telephone number to confirm. Next, record a voice mail greeting on your PC, and from that point forward, Google will accept voice mail, transcribe it and send it via SMS or by e-mail.

Google relies on its proprietary voice-recognition technology to transcribe your messages, and it is quite accurate. A company spokesperson said the service was good enough in most cases to let you get the gist of a message, which is fair.

In some situations, it falls short. I left three messages with the different voice mail-to-text services, and I delivered the messages twice — once without background noise and once with Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watch­tower” in the background. “After I got two messages, Go­ogle sent me an e-mail transcription of the message, with an audio file of the recording attached.” That beat the other services by a minute or so, mainly because unlike most competitors, Google never uses humans to help transcribe phrases. That is a reason that Google is free, but it is also a reason that accuracy can sometimes suffer.

As with PhoneTag, you can always listen to the sound file, which impressively muted the background music and rendered the message clearly. Google also lets you listen to the file from within your e-mail directory. PhoneTag forces you to download the file and open an application to play it, though it says users can change their preferences to hear a message without downloading.

The headline there, though, is that you no longer have to dial into your voice mail. No more listening to the prompts or dialing passwords or watching voice mail pile up. AT&T’s failure to include this feature on its service was disappointing. And while we are doling out disappointment: AT&T’s service works on all AT&T phones except the iPhone. Both PhoneTag and AT&T took a minute or so longer to deliver my noisier voice mail, probably because they routed parts of the message to professional transcribers.

—International Herald Tribune