Monday, December 10, 2007

Note to Self: Remember Voice ?

Update: I see another startup Kwiry launched this week with text based reminders instead of voice.
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Ah, the killer apps of mobiles. As readers know I'm a fan of voice and text based mashup services on mobiles such as SpinVox's Spin-my-memo service.

There's a new entrant ReQall by QTech with its voice-to-text based tasks / notes and meetings reminders.

I think it's a slightly different proposition to Spinvox coming more from a "capture your thoughts/tasks on your mobile + reminder" angle rather than Spinvox's traditional voicemail-to-text offering (which they've expanded on, into memo/notes and Social Networking/Blogging).

After registering for the service, you call a number (UK:0800 692 8780) then either press 1 or say "add" to leave a voice memo, or "3" or say "recall" to recall a previoulsy left voice memo. So far, not a lot different from leaving yourself a voicemail on your operators network...however there's a few features that make the service a little more accessible.

Text and email notifications can be configured with reminder options. The SMS option sends you a text of the transcoded content of what you've said. Screenshots of email and texts are below.

There's RSS feeds for push updates you can consume in your blog reader and the obligatory iPhone version for access to the service on the web.

Calendar and search functions within the fixed web based interface are a useful addition so you can see when you've added notes and quickly find them.

Plus there's the visual-voicemail type web interface for accessing the list of tasks/memos and you can listen to the audio or read the text - you choose. Overall I liked the interface and it was all very easy to set up but there's no mobile web interface as yet.

Spinvox has more voice-to-end-destination options especially with blast and the social networking sites (jaiku, twitter, FB etc..I followed Symbian-Guru via Jaiku at the recent Nokia World event and noted he was using SpinVox to post his updates - I'm sure this was much easier than trying to Twit or Jaiku individual blog posts). Spinvox are also getting traction in the market having recently signed up with some of the major UK mobile operators.

Jott in the US also added the ability to voice record a events straight into Google Calendar (as well Amazon wishlist) from your mobile / landline.

Looks like voice on the mobile is not quite dead yet and as more of us outsource our memory to the cloud :) these types of service may become increasingly handy.


1 comments:

Whatley said...

Nice to see I wasn't the only one following the Guru through SpinVox!

:)