Voicemail is evolving. For years, retrieving a voice message meant dialing into a mailbox, entering a password, and having to listen to message one to get to message four.

Things are changing. The iPhone has brought us Visual Voicemail, which associates a voice message to a contact in your address book, and lets you view each message individually in an email inbox-like application (seen below).

There’s a new “big thing” in voicemail, and it’s audio to text conversion. That means that you no longer have to listen to voicemails, you can, rather, have them emailed or text messaged to you. Remember SpinVox? It’s one such service that offers voice to text conversion. In our SpinVox Five Week Update, I expressed my satisfaction with the service – it has VERY high accuracy rates and was perfectly reliable. A problem with SpinVox was that it didn’t associate the caller with your contacts, and if there was a poor text conversion, you’d have to still call into a mailbox and find the message.

What if you could have iPhone Visual Voicemail and text conversion right on your phone? How about an online interface to manage everything? Then you could read voicemails if you desire, or listen to the entire audio file from an application on your phone, or from the web.

On Wednesday, I’m going to write about a new product from SimulScribe, which is a company that has a similar product to SpinVox, but they go further by adding a Windows Mobile application that does everything described above. Juicy details coming soon!