Read Your Voicemail
I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on phones and related accessories and services, in no small part due to the recent release of the Apple iPhone. One of the more interesting services I’ve come across is from a company called SimulScribe. Simply put, SimulScribe offers a voicemail service that uses voice recognition technology to convert all voice messages into text and immediately send them to your cell phone or e-mail. This allows you read your voice messages right away, without needing to actively listen to them. This is a simple but powerful idea. Being able to read your messages should save a lot of time, especially if you’ve got a lot of messages in your voicemail box. You can quickly see which messages are important or urgent and be able to take action, rather than spending the time required to listen to entire messages.
SimulScribe’s basic plan costs $9.95 per month for up to 40 messages, then 25 cents for each message after 40. This seems like a reasonable cost, unless you receive a lot more than 40 voicemail messages per month. Calls where no messages are left do not get counted toward your bill. SimulScribe claims that their service will work with any wireless carrier and most landline or corporate voicemail systems.
While the point of the service is to send your voice messages as text, you always have the option to actually listen to any voicemail, which is useful in situations where significant background noise may prevent the voice recognition from working. Perhaps the most useful aspect of SimulScribe is that once the messages are in text, you don’t need to write down the important information from the message. As long as you keep your text messages around, you can easily find names, address, or other important information. You can also go to SimulScribe’s web site to search, sort, and archive converted messages as you do with e-mail. This is just not possible with regular voicemail.
The most impressive thing about SimulScribe, however, is the numerous awards and testimonials the service has received. Personally, I saw enough recognizable names and awards to convince me to give SimulScribe’s service a try, at the very least for their free 1 week trial. I’ll be starting their service soon, so If you’re interested in finding out how the service worked for me, feel free to contact me and I’ll let you know.