Unofficial Technology

I know I promised that I would write about overcoming some of the “missing features” of Google Apps., and I will. But I was just listening to the Audible edition of Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek as well as the companion blog and I noticed on there a post about having everything going into your email. I think this is an excellent idea. I vastly prefer email to voice mail or phone calls.

However, the process that Tim elaborates is flawed in one minor detail – the lack of tools to carry this out in its most efficient form. If I have my voice mail transcribed and sent to my email, to respond I either have to look up the email address or I have to call them back.

So here’s my idea of the killer iPhone app – well system, really. I would like a web service that answers my calls and takes the voice mail. Then either the same web service transcribes it or sends it off to another service to be transcribed into text. The transcribed message would then be sent to my email with the original phone number as the from address. When I receive the email on the iPhone, the iPhone should be able to automatically look through my contacts for a matching phone number. If that contact has an email address, I should be able to choose whether to respond via phone call or email without any additional look up.