Get your voicemail by SMS
Takes about a minute · Free Mobile (France) today, more carriers on request
Scribe can text you your voicemail transcripts, so a missed call reaches you even with no data connection. It does this through your own carrier's notification API, using a key you generate yourself and can revoke at any moment.
WhatsApp voice notes are not texted to you. Those already arrive in WhatsApp, under the note itself, so an SMS for each one would just be noise. SMS is there for voicemail, which would otherwise land silently.
Why your key and not ours. The SMS is sent from your own line to your own phone. We never hold a carrier credential, and the day you revoke the key the messages stop, no need to ask us.
Steps
- Open your carrier's options page. With Free Mobile that is Mon compte → Mon forfait mobile → Mes options.
- Find "Notifications par SMS" and switch it on. An API key appears next to it.
There is a copy button beside the field.
Enable Notifications par SMS. The API key is the value in the field beside it, use the copy icon rather than typing it out. - Note your subscriber ID. It is the Identifiant shown at the top left of your account page, an 8-digit number, not your phone number.
- Paste both into Scribe. On your account page, open the SMS section, tick "Send me an SMS for each transcript", fill in the subscriber ID and the API key, and save.
- Test it. Call your own number from another phone and leave a message. The voicemail transcript should arrive as a text within a minute or two.
If no SMS arrives
- Wrong ID or key, the carrier rejects the request outright. Double-check the subscriber ID is the 8-digit Identifiant, not your mobile number.
- The option is off, if you switched "Notifications par SMS" back off, the key stops working immediately.
- Too many messages too fast, carriers rate-limit these. A burst of voice notes can hit the limit; it clears on its own.
- Long transcripts are shortened. An SMS is short. Anything past roughly 900 characters is cut with an ellipsis, the full text is always in WhatsApp.
Other carriers
Scribe currently speaks Free Mobile's notification API. If your carrier offers something similar, write to [email protected] with a link to their documentation and we will look at adding it.