Support your customers better with voice notes

For the last couple of years I have been using some free services that allow me to make a note to myself with a quick phone call. It is very convenient in the car for example, when Im going over the day's events and want to make a reminder, but getting to my notebook would be dangerous. And if you're the kind of person like me that is always thinking of people I should contact, or things I need/want to do, it's nice to press a button and speak my thoughts (such as, "send John the link to the whitepaper about EPM and Performance Point Server") and have them emailed right to me within a minute or two (thus, keeping the note in my inbox instead of my head.)

The benfit of some of these services (and once again, they are free) is that they transcribe the messages for you, and then email you the transcript. They are easy to try(takes just a minute), and I have never received spam from them, so I recommend you try it. Obviously, you can also heave them transcribe your voice mails, if that's what you want to do. Here are the three I have used.

Jott was the first service I heard of in this space, and I used it for nearly two years, until they started asking for a subscription. You can leave up to 15 seconds of audio (more than you think), but you have to go to the site to see the transcription in the free version. Plans start at $4/month, and they have a number of discounts to get that down further. The notes are usually transcribed within a minute. It also allows you to send the notes to other people, and to many, many services, including your calendar and task list services.

Dial2Do is what I'm using now. It is 100% free, and you can set it to email ot text you the transcription. It can take 2-3 minutes to recieve the transcription. Only issue I have with it is that if you integrate it with something like RememberTheMilk (which I do) you dont get the email, instead the note goes straight to the service (although you can still see the duplicated notes on the Dial2Do site too).

ReQall is the last one I tried. It is as reliable as Dial2Do. My only issue with it is that it doesn't integrate natively with many other services. You can hack it with emails that forward to the sites, but I don't find it as reliable as the native API integrations. If I only needed the email transcript (which is all I used it for for a long time) it would be more than up to the task.

I'd recommend these to anyone - once you start using them you can't stop, because it is a way to never forget that fleeting thought again.

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Spend time on this if you want to know some of the future of computing...

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When will we be done?
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This attachment contains 9 items total:
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Seven PDFs which are sample output for each report
One zip file of the Visual Studio project with report source code.
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