I've looked for this off and on over the years and haven't found anything I really liked. The closest I came to it was Youmail. It isn't an open source app, which is a bummer, but it seems to be a (at least sort of) privacy respecting company. I remember reading their privacy policy at one point and not seeing anything terrible in it.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Thank you, the 20 transcriptions allowed per month is more than enough for me. It is unfortunate that it's not open at all, but it is what it is, I suppose.
I use youmail free too. I doubt it's very privacy respecting, but it does the trick for the few voicemails I get.
I built my own a while back using twilio and my own android app, but gave up on it, can't remember why exactly anymore.
There isn't a turnkey solution I know of, but if you can have a tool save voicemails into a folder, you could probably have a script generate text files based on a Speech To Text (STT) solution:
I don't know of any way to save voicemails as audio files, unfortunately.
Ahh, so this isn't a processing issue it's a data access issue.
Frankly, if you can't access the raw data of your voicemail inbox, probably no third party developer can too. This means that the only way to implement such a tool would to be to work with the voicemail provider. If they're a for-profit company, they probably have no incentive to make the data available unless there's a big moneybag involved somewhere in the exchange. That's probably why no such tool exists.
That makes sense :(
Many phone/cell providers provide a method to send voicemails to a third party, if you setup call forwarding (busy or unanswered, don't set unconditional) for reference, this page covers how to do that for T-Mobile
https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/self-service-short-codes
The new voicemail provider may allow you to save messages better, or might offer transcoding themselves.
https://freeappsforme.com/free-voicemail-apps/
(I would have included this all earlier, if I thought of it earlier 😅)
Thank you!!
If you have a homelab or vps you could try rolling your own with https://hub.docker.com/r/onerahmet/openai-whisper-asr-webservice for the transcription and a foss Tasker alternative for retreiving the voicemail when your dialler app posts a voicemail notification. If you don't have the capability to selfhost whisper, you'd probably have to sacrifice the illusion of privacy (your mobile carrier will always have access to any calls made over their network) and use a transcription service from google/microsoft/openai.
Asterisk https://www.asterisk.org/ might be worth a look too (i.e. selfhost your voicemails)
This is definitely the most privacy-oriented answer. I don't have a homelab, but thank you for the info! Maybe someday...