VMSave preserves your deceased loved one's voicemail greeting
Losing a loved one is one of the hardest things in the world. A new service saves the voicemail greetings of those who've passed away so you can listen to them forever.
When you lose someone close to you, you search for things -- pictures, videos, other memories -- that you can hold onto to keep the memory of your loved one fresh. A new service called VMSave adds another potential tangible connection to your repertoire, saving your loved one's voicemail greeting as an MP3 file you can keep.
Using the service is pretty simple. You just enter your loved one's phone number into the VMSave website before deactivating their cellular or home phone service, and their phone will receive a call from VMSave's dedicated phone number. As long as you don't answer the phone, VMSave will automatically record their greeting, save it as an MP3 file, and put a download link on the site so you can save the file to your computer or cloud storage service.
I tested out VMSave to see how well it worked, and it worked as advertised. After about a minute, I had an MP3 file of the greeting on my iPhone downloaded to my computer. I quickly deleted, it of course, because, well, I'm not in fact dead, and I hate hearing the sound of my own voice.
Pete Keen, the Michigan software developer behind VMSave, created the service after two people close to him passed away within months of each other in 2013. VMSave is completely free to use, though Keen is accepting PayPal donations to help cover the costs of the project and keep it running long-term.
While a voicemail might not be that useful in the modern age where we have an abundance of pictures and videos of our loved ones, having a clip of their voice gives people one more way to remember their departed friends and family members.