Sneak That Voice Mail Directly With No Ring

If you’ve ever worried about calling your boss or someone in a meeting and interrupting them unnecessarily, Buz Interactive might have the solution. The Palo Alto, Calif. company’s new SENDaBuz service lets you send voice mail messages to any cell phone in the U.S. without the recipient’s phone ringing.

The service works via a toll-free number (888-573-6322) or online at Buz Interactive’s SENDaBuz Web site. SENDaBuz is free to new users for 30 days and 15 cents a message thereafter.

There a few more noteworthy wrinkles to the service. You can send voice messages from overseas via the Web site, which makes it cheaper than text messaging which can cost 30 cents or more per message.

“Also a voice message can be as long as two minutes and it’s much more personal,” says Steve Ehrlich, vice president of marketing and co-founder of Buz Interactive. There’s also no charge to the recipient of a SENDaBuz message.

To use the service online, you record a voicemail message at a computer using a standard microphone and enter the recipient’s mobile phone number. No microphone? No problem. SENDaBUZ is set up to let you call in your message from a phone and then send it from the Web site.

IDC analyst Julien Blin thinks there’s definitely a market for SENDaBuz. “There are times you’re in a meeting and forget to mute the phone and it’s annoying to be interrupted,” Blin told internetnews.com. “Sometimes the call is not that important you can’t check it later, so from my point of view it’s a great idea. It’s also a good alternative to calling cards when you just need to leave a message.”

Ehrlich believes SENDaBUZ is the only service of its kind that works with all the phone carriers. “Delivering voice messaging without the phone ringing is a hard functionality to develop,” Ehrlich told internetnews.com. “And our service works for all the carriers in the U.S. so you don’t have to know what the person you’re sending to uses.”

Buz Interactive is working on expanding the SENDaBUZ to land line and VoIP  phones. Another project Ehrlich mentioned is a celebrity greeting service that will let you mix your phone greeting with, for example a message from Snoop Dogg.