CEO of PhoneTag James Siminoff awoke to chatter on Twitter this morning suggesting his company, which converts voicemail to text, died during the night. He suggests bloggers give too much credit to Google. “Category killer? Hardly! From a fear factor side, I don’t see Google moving my lunch. They are getting into a biz they don’t understand. l laugh at that.” That may be the nicest thing he said about Google in the interview.

SimulScribe offers a great service, one that is a benefit to anyone who dislikes checking and responding to voicemail. They convert your voicemail message to text and then deliver it to you as either an email or text message, to which you can then respond to the “voicemail” by return message. This is a wonderful option to have, especially when you need to check and respond to messages but are in a setting where using and speaking on a phone would be considered rude. It also helps to save time, because you can simply read the important parts of the message and get the details you need without having to listen to whoever is leaving the message ramble on and on.

While all this sounds great, and there service works wonderful their name has been holding them back. The name SimulScribe was born from “Simultaneous Voicemail Transcription,” and while its a catchy name, it turns out that a name with missing letters is not always a good way to get customers to be able to find you easily.

CTIA exposed a bunch of new companies getting into the voice to text game and it is expected to be a fast growing area. This morning saw my post on Nuance, a company bringing voice to text to GPS (in addition to a voicemail to text service), last month we saw Spinvox get $100 million in investment to grow internationally. Today, I got the opportunity to mix it up with James Simonoff, CEO of SimulScribe whose company is a leader in voicemail to text serivce and get the pulse of his company and where he believes the market is headed. Simulscribe also extended a 30 day free trial for Gadgetell readers. See the end of the post for link.

SimulScribe has had a busy day today. To start the day off, I name SimulScribe to my short list of CES unsung heroes. Then comes a press release about a potentially harming lawsuit settlement with Klausner who apparently holds the patent for visual voice messaging, which Simulscribe was infringing on (along with a host of more »

I have the patience of a four year old. I don’t want to know about things available in six months, I want it now. OK, really I wanted it five minutes ago, but you get my drift. CES is all about the future and that is fine, but what about things you can take away now? Here is my list of cool things I took away:

SimulScribe - I’ve been waffling back and forth on giving this a shot. This service takes over your voicemail from your carrier and then emails/sms you the transcribed version along with a wav file. That sounds scary at first, but it is simple and completely reversible, not unlike a vasectomy. The result is you don’t need to stand there listening to voicemail (which is a complete waste of time). Instead of playing the message and listening to callers stumble over their ideas, you cut right to the chase and speed-read their message.