Simulscribe Adds Contact List Integration

[Web 2.0] For those who are not familiar with Simulscribe (soon to be renamed PhoneTag), it is a service that you can setup to intercept your mobile phone voicemails and have it send it to you, translated in text via SMS or email. When using email, the message comes with an attached audio file containing the original message. Previously, email notifications came from a mailbox@my.simulscribe.com address with a subject like “SimulScribe from (xxx) xxx-xxxx” that was not really actionable.

With the contact list integration, the system will search for the caller’s number in your contact list, find the matching contact name and/or the company name and send you a message as follow:

From: contact-email (contact name)
Subject: SimulScribe from contact phone number
Translated message: message

Now, you can take action by replying via email directly to your contact address or by calling back, knowing who it is who called you. The system is also smart enough to use the contact name text information when translating the message. In the past, it was difficult to guess how names were spelled, especially if they are foreign names. Everything happens in the back-end and should be instantly available to all users, on all phones – that’s smart. 

When the new feature rolls out, you can update your contact list by uploading a file to Simulscribe. When it launches, it will accept files from popular personal information managers like Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail, GMAIL, Hotmail and MSN. The file format is fairly simple and it should be easy for other to write exporters.

If you wonder, there won’t be an automated synchronization yet because it raises security concerns and I suspect that it will also take more time. Users can re-upload a new file anytime, basically re-importing their whole contact list. There won’t be any duplicates: the import process deletes the old contacts and imports the new list.

Simulscribe works very well, and we have no problem recommending that you take a look at it. [Simulscribe site]