Do you control your voicemail or does it control you? If you’re like a lot of people, you often find yourself listening to long-winded messages one after another, get frustrated when people don’t get to the point, or don’t make clear why you should call them back. There are some good solutions available that can put you in much more control of your voicemail—by making it visual. Simulscribe and CallWave are two services to look into.

Simulscribe converts your voicemail messages to text using a speech recognition engine and sends a transcription to your mobile phone, handheld device, and/or e-mail account. If you’ve had heinous experiences with speech recognition, where you feel lucky if “recognize speech” is translated as “wreck a nice beach,” you’ll be surprised by how accurate the transcriptions are.
Simulscribe occasionally flubs words, but it gets most of them right, and I find I can always get the gist of what a message is in the transcriptions. Also, you get a .WAV file of each original audio message if you choose to listen to it. If the application has no transcription for a particular word it just says “garbled.”
I use Simulscribe by having it send me e-mail transcriptions, which I find works best. If you don’t choose to go the e-mail route, there is an online interface that lets you search, delete, etc. In my e-mail inbox, I can see voicemail messages right alongside my normal e-mail messages.
The application works with most major carriers, and some carriers under certain plans may charge minutes for forwarded calls. Simulscribe is $29.95 a month for unlimited messages, but if you tend to get under 40 messages a month, there is a $9.95 plan. I wish the unlimited service were a bit cheaper, but the application definitely saves time and frustration.

If you’re determined to find a free solution, you may want to look into CallWave’s Vtxt (see above). It’s in beta right now, and you can use it for free. I haven’t used Vtxt yet, but it appears to have most of the features found in Simulscribe.
Do you have any good tips on efficiency applications for mobile phones?
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