SimulScribe, the popular voicemail transcription company, confirmed Wednesday that it is changing its name to PhoneTag, which it hopes customers will have a much easier time remembering and spelling. The company is also introducing contact integration, a significant upgrade to the company's popular service.

Up until this point, whenever a SimulScribe--er, PhoneTag--subscriber received a voice mail message, they had the option of receiving an e-mail notification from that included the translated text contents. But starting today, users can upload their address book into their PhoneTag account. That will enable e-mail notifications to appear to come from the actual caller.

By adding contact integration, PhoneTag now lets subscribers respond to voice mail messages by sending a quick e-mail. In addition, the contact integration lets PhoneTag confirm the proper spelling of the name, in case the system doesn't translate it correctly. While PhoneTag to this point has had fairly accurate transcription rates, it falls down on proper names and often guesses the wrong one entirely, so this is a welcome upgrade.

PC Magazine was given early access to test the service. Unfortunately, the address book import stumbled on a test Apple Mail vCard file. The file had 536 contacts, but the system generated a validation error and only imported some of them. In addition to Apple Mail, the contact integration feature currently works with Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and Google Gmail contacts.

In effect, what's happening is that PhoneTag is spoofing the address of the notification so that it appears to come from the caller, at least in the Reply-To field if not the actual Mail-To field. That could raise privacy concerns, as it can look as if the caller has given permission for this to happen, even though they have no idea it did. An unscrupulous person could then forward the e-mail message onto others with the original header attached, along with the contents of the voice mail itself (which were already being sent in e-mail before, just not from the user's actual e-mail address.)

When looked at another way, this doesn't fit the traditional definition of a privacy intrusion. It doesn't give a subscriber an e-mail address that he or she didn't already have, for example; the address already had to be in the user's phone book for this to work. We'll confirm all this, and whether or not there's a security concern with the new contact integration, as the company gets the bugs worked out.

In a related announcement, PhoneTag now also integrates with Google's GrandCentral, a virtual PBX service that lets you combine your work, home, and mobile numbers into one phone number that can ring on any of your phones. The same goes for voice mail, which can also be consolidated and accessed online or from your phone. With the latest PhoneTag upgrade, you can translate voice mail messages directly from GrandCentral.

For more information, read our full reviews of SimulScribe, SimulSays for BlackBerry and SimulSays for Windows Mobile.