Hello, Computer?

In the world of "Star Trek," you can speak into the air and a computer does your bidding. A couple of free services, Jott and reQall, provide a number of very useful services using nothing but your voice and a cell phone call.

Though there have been many solutions for doing home-automation by voice command for years, it's been less-than-practical to do complex voice-recognition tasks while on-the-go - the computing power demands are a bit too high. However, I've been expecting our ubiquitous cell phones to bring us this capability by interfacing with remote computers for some years now. These two services use a combination of computers and humans to allow you to send text messages, email, manage appointments and more through only your voice on a cell phone.

Text messaging between telephones using SMS (Short Message Service) is a very useful way to asynchronously (not at the same time, as in a voice call) communicate with others, but not everyone is comfortable with typing text messages, however short, on the 10-key pad of their cell phone. "Thumbing" text on your phone while driving is just plain stupid. Jott lets you dictate messages by voice, which are automatically converted to text and sent as SMS or email.

Once you've subscribed and configured the services with your cell phone number, you simply call the service number from your cell and talk to use the services. (In addition to automatically converting your speech to text, Jott also includes a link to your original audio.)
I like the idea of sending email to myself from a voice call as a note-taking system - it automatically puts a thought into a paradigm I already manage regularly - text in my email. One of the failings of keeping notes on tape recorders, tapeless recorders and note pads in the past has been the need to transcribe them to a central location - a computer. I use a PDA for this constantly, but there are times when I can't or shouldn't stop to write.

reQall is a bit more phone-centric, allowing users to manage and search stored audio notes through the cell phone.

PRIVACY
Both Jott and reQall also uses human transcribers in addition to machine, but they promise that there is full anonymity of the users. Still, this is a privacy issue that you'll have to consider. Read Jott's and reQall's privacy policies.