Vox Populi

Not even voicemail can escape Big G, it seems - Google Voice, built off Grand Central's technology, will transform your voice messages into email transcripts. In the era of mobile computing this could be a wise move indeed, although it will certainly enrage privacy advocates.

At heart, this is a fairly basic application of speech recognition software; simply strap together a recognition engine, a mailing script, and something to monitor your phone and you've got a working replacement. Replace the phone with Skype (or, better yet, open-source equivalent Ekiga) and the monitoring step becomes a great deal easier - you could even use it to archive all your phone calls. For the paranoid, you could toss in an extra pass through PGP and skip the mailing script, archiving instead to a TrueCrypt'd partition. (Of course, you'd have to encrypt your calls in the first place.)