grasshopper-voicemail-monitor

Voicemail & Notification-Email Monitor

Overview

Many virtual phone products auto-transcribe voicemails and email the transcript to one or more inboxes (Grasshopper — GoDaddy's virtual phone — does this; Google Voice, OpenPhone and similar services have equivalents). That email is all you need for a fully automated lead-intake pipeline — no audio processing, no transcription API, no polling the provider's dashboard.

This skill describes a monitor that polls those inboxes every 3 minutes via IMAP, extracts the transcript and caller info, logs the voicemail to the CRM database, and delivers a formatted summary to the right person's Telegram.

Key insight: the provider already gives you speech-to-text in the email body. Don't build transcription — parse the notification.

Architecture

Voicemail left → provider auto-transcribes → notification email → IMAP inbox
  ↓ (cron script polls every 3 min, no_agent=True)
Python monitor script: ~/.hermes/scripts/voicemail_monitor.py
  ├─ IMAP search for unread mail FROM the provider
  ├─ Parse: caller #, transcript, extension, timestamp, callback numbers
  ├─ CRM: create lead (new caller) or log activity (returning caller)
  └─ Format clean Telegram message (tappable phone links)
  ↓ (empty stdout = silent = zero tokens when no new voicemails)
Deliver to the right person (extension routing → their Telegram chat)

Components

Monitor script

~/.hermes/scripts/voicemail_monitor.py — takes one argument identifying which inbox to poll (e.g. owner-a / owner-b, one per extension recipient).

Wrapper scripts (required): the Hermes cron script field treats the entire string as a filename — including spaces and arguments. A script that needs an argument cannot be called directly from a cron job. Create one wrapper per variant:

#!/bin/bash
# ~/.hermes/scripts/voicemail_owner_a.sh
exec python3 "$(dirname "$0")/voicemail_monitor.py" owner-a

See references/cron-script-arguments.md for the full pattern.