What’s the Best SpeakPipe Alternative for Podcast Voice Feedback?
There are many online voice recording tools: SpeakPipe is the most well-known. It can help the message recipient organize, transcribe, and re-use the messages. But, it’s not the only one. There are others which also can make it easy for your audience to keep in touch, help you understand and organize the messages, and let you re-purpose the content. There’s no reason not to use SpeakPipe, but some tools do more things at different prices. The best SpeakPipe alternative is the one which fits your podcast’s needs and budget. Let’s take a look at some of these online voice recorder tools, so you can figure out which one best fits your needs and budget.
What’s Wrong with SpeakPipe?
Absolutely nothing: many podcasters use it. Seth Godin, Dave Jackson, and we ourselves use SpeakPipe. Colin has talked it up in our PodCraft podcast. Any time we recommend a tool or a piece of gear, we want you to be able to choose what’s right for your podcasting budget, workflow, and goals.
SpeakPipe’s Pricing:
Free: 30 messages a month, each 90 seconds long. You can store up to 100MB worth of messages, set up one messaging widget, and SpeakPipe notifies you about your messages via email.
Gold ($15/month): Unlimited messages, each up to five minutes long, 50 GB of storage, you can set up multiple customizable widgets, and the email notifications have the audio file attached. This price tier also has a 30-day free trial.
Premium ($45/month): Unlimited messages, each up to ten minutes long, 500 GB of storage, you can set up multiple customizable widgets, and the email notifications have the audio file attached. This price tier also has a 30-day free trial.
This is good. And, the variety of features in these other plans should pop your toaster, too.
Telbee
Telbee is very similar to SpeakPipe, but they offer transcripts of the voice recordings, or “voxes,” and support for nine different languages.
There’s also a resource library to help you integrate with different website builders, or use Telbee for customer service, education, and community building. Not only that, but they offer a Chrome extension and guides to podcast marketing.
Telbee’s Pricing:
Free: 60 voice minutes per month, and 60 transcription minutes per month, plus 1 month of messaging history. The messages are up to one minute long. This also includes automatic transcription and a choice of channel languages.
Starter ($18/month): This price tier offers unlimited voice messaging and transcription, and up to 6 months of message history. You can customize colors, logos and styles for voice channels and notification emails, download voxes as mp3s, and you can set the length of the voxes from 15 seconds to 5 minutes.
Pro ($30/month): At this level, you can have more than one team member working on the same account. It comes with unlimited voice messaging and transcription, and up to 1 year of message history. It offers everything in the Starter plan, plus when you re-purpose the voxes, you can add text, images and links, even choose the recording bitrate.
Team ($48/month): This price tier lets you have at least six team members and two inbound channels. It offers everything in the Pro package, plus a beta test of Zapier integrations. This way you can use your voxes with other productivity apps.
Telbee is like the sister of SpeakPipe who went away to school, learned a lot of languages and came back with a whole bunch of educational material for you. If your audience speaks multiple languages and you re-purpose audience content, Telbee is the best SpeakPipe alternative for you.
PodInBox
If Telbee is SpeakPipe’s librarian sister, PodInBox is the sassy cousin with loads of friends. PodInBox doesn’t just help you solicit and organize voice messages. You can make a fan page, ask for donations with the messages, and incentivize engagement. Your fans can achieve status ranks and win badges for leaving messages and donating. Instead of an avatar image or logo, PodInBox helps you make a gif that opens an introduction video when the user clicks on it.
PodInBox’s Pricing
Hobby ($0): There’s no subscription fee, but PodInBox takes a 5% fee on fan donations. You get one fan page and unlimited audio messages.
Pro ($9/month): Here’s where the donation fees disappear. This tier offers one fan page, and unlimited audio messages. You have an unlimited number of team members. There’s also Mailchimp integration, and you can make welcome videos.
Business ($19/month): This tier offers everything from the Pro price tier, but you get 3 fan pages.
If you want messaging combined with community engagement and crowdfunding, PodInBox might be the best SpeakPipe alternative for you.
PodInBox doesn’t have to party all the time; she can blend in. Your fan page can display your messages, or keep them private. With the paid plans, you can invite voice messages with a WordPress plugin, an embeddable widget code, or PodPage integration.
Reverb (Beta)
Reverb is an online voice messaging tool for schools and universities. Or, at least, it will be. Right now, this platform is only available by invitation. Currently, Reverb’s online voice recorder can put a sound file into a social media post, for free. There’s a Chrome extension as well. When this tool is live, it will make it easier for students and teachers of any budget to communicate. Combined with an education podcast, this can make people excited about learning in new ways. If you’re teaching an online class, Reverb could be the best SpeakPipe alternative for you.
SpeakPipe is Good. The Alternatives Have More Variety.
Again, SpeakPipe is a great tool. But, what if you want more than just the ability to record and hear messages? Telbee and PodInBox can help you organize and build on the message intent. No two podcasts are exactly alike, so there’s no single “best” tool for any aspect of podcasting. If you want something flashy that builds your fan base and makes money, or something more subtle that enhances understanding, try one of these other tools and find out what they can do for you and your podcast.
