I love my Palm TX, loaded with e-book software and heavy on content; it has become my portable library. I know people who have friendly thoughts about their cell phones.

But I challenge you to find anyone with a kind word to say about voice mail, that bane of modern life that is as necessary as it is burdensome.

Sure, we have to have it, especially in smaller businesses, and it's needed in the modern home to catch important messages. But the digital era has swept right past voice mail. One of its annoyances is that once you push the button, you have to listen to all your messages in sequence. If you have eight of them, good luck trying to jump from the second to the seventh. And you can't tell who's calling until you play the message.

Why do we put up with such nonsense and with the robot voices that answer so many phones today? And how about the long voice mail queues that greet us at businesses, making us move through menu trees that are as challenging as Sudoku?

It's because until recently, we haven't had a viable digital alternative, one that brings to voice mail some of the traits of e-mail: quick identification of sender and subject, and the ability to forward messages and choose the message you want to read now.

Now, Jott helps ideas travel

All that is changing, as can be seen with Jott (www.jott.com). The Seattle startup had a killer concept: help people get their ideas into a computer, even when they are miles from their desks. All it takes is a call to Jott.

You tell the service who the message goes to and voice identification handles the rest. It consults your pre-loaded contact list (or group, because you can broadcast Jott messages) then sends your voice message.

Then a combination of digital magic and human labor kicks in. Your message rockets off to a server, from which it is accessed by a worker in a call center in India, where the audio file is transcribed and sent as a text message or an e-mail message.

The free service is simplicity itself, with no file download needed. Because transcribing audio files can introduce mistakes (especially on a murky cell phone connection), e-mail you receive from Jott contains a link to the original audio file.

Technology always shows its developers how best to use it. What the Jott team seems to have discovered is that people love Jott for taking notes. As a writer, I always come up with ideas on my walks. I can stop and write them down, but Jott is easier. I can program my phone with Jott's number, push a button and leave a message to myself. Back at the office, an e-mail message arrives with my idea intact, thanks to Jott and the helpful folks in India.

When I saw how Jott worked, I realized that I was dealing with a new way of moving voice around the computer networks that could leverage standard voice mail.

GotVoice converts voice mail

Which quickly led to GotVoice (www.gotvoice.com), a much more complex service that captures voice mail and converts it to text. Your messages appear as e-mail on your phone or computer with attached MP3 files of the voice message. You can go through your voice mail much like e-mail, choosing what you listen to and when. You can use filters to generate full text transcriptions for particular messages only.

And here's something I like. GotVoice's visual voice mail feature is tailored to mobile phones. All of your voice mail can be monitored and read, and, if your phone can play MP3 files, it can play the original audio as well. Outbound messaging to groups is easy, and the service can be set to retrieve your messages on a schedule or on demand, readable from any computer over the GotVoice Web site. There is a free trial, but after that, GotVoice asks $9.95 a month.

Pinger skips annoying prompts

The number of companies entering this interesting space is growing. I have a fondness for the free Pinger service (www.pinger.com) because it provides shortcuts to another voice mail annoyance: the need to listen to prompts and canned messages when you're trying to leave a message.

You leave your message at the Pinger number and it's forwarded to the recipient, who gets a text message on his or her cell phone to announce its arrival. A push of a button on the phone allows the actual message to be played. And that's it -- no wading through phone prompts or "I'm away from my desk" announcements. The message goes straight to one or a group of people and can be up to five minutes long. Pinger, which works only on cell phones, is a great way to save mobile minutes. It also offers a Web-based inbox for message management.

Voice mail isn't the most lovable of our technologies, but we use it because the human voice carries a range of expression that the average e-mail message can't convey.

We just have to find better ways to manage voice. What we're seeing is a creative jostling for space that will result in companies figuring out the best way to bring e-mail flexibility to voice mail. Watch for new phone-to-Web ideas as this concept evolves.