The telephony infrastructure vendor is offering a system that can convert spoken voicemail messages into text, use that text in a message in any e-mail system, and optionally send the voicemail itself as an attached audio file. The product was introduced Monday at the VoiceCon trade show in San Francisco.

This frees recipients to read their voicemail instead of listening to it, if they are in a setting where it's hard to hear or awkward to listen to a message, Avaya said. It also means that voicemail, in the form of text, can be stored, searched and read just like any other kind of business communication. That can help companies comply with disclosure laws, the company said.

Avaya's system, which it calls Speech to Text, uses the SpinVox Speech to Text messaging service and the EVM1 (Enabled VoiceMail) gateway software from Mutare. It's available now for use with the Avaya Modular Messaging voice and fax platform.

Avaya is one of the largest purveyors of unified communications, a set of technologies designed to let people manage their communications as they like and be contacted in the best possible way given where they are and what devices they have on hand. But the concept, which is built around making everything into packets on a single IP (Internet Protocol) network, also opens up new possibilities for merged forms of communication.

Avaya already has a system based on Mutare's software for one-stop access to voice and fax messages from an e-mail inbox. EVM delivers voicemail as audio attachments, and the addition of Speech to Text adds the written version. Avaya claims it is the first such system for enterprises.