"Take a Note"

This past week I decided to try a new service that one of my favorite tech writers, David Pogue, recommended recently. The service is called SpinVox. It's a really cool service that takes the spoken word an transcribes it for you. I realize that's nothing new. Software that does that has been around for a number of years. However, SpinVox puts a new spin on the concept.

As I said, SpinVox is not software but a service. There are four applications of this service to which you can subscribe: voicemail, blogging, memos, and broadcast. The power of these services may not be apparent at first glance but, trust me, the time savings and convenience these services offer are huge.

I get calls all the time in which people leave long strings of information that I will need to write down for follow up and reference. My kids probably think daddy is a leet-til unstable the way I'll shush everyone from talking when we're in the car getting ready to go somewhere and I keep replaying a voicemail on my Treo's speaker-phone while I try to make sure I got the right name and phone number of the potential new customer I need to call back. You see, I'm listening to the message in phone mode, and then I have to switch to task list mode and open the memo field to type in the info, and when I need to replay the message because the kids were asking "What's taking so long?" I have to go back to phone mode, and...never mind. You get the picture. All that's happening while the family is waiting for me to start the van and get going.

Life would be so much easier if everyone would just text message me instead of leaving a voicemail. Then I could just copy and paste the info into my tasklist for follow up. Well SpinVox turns all the voicemail's into text massages (and emails) for me. The accuracy is impressive too.

That's pretty much the feature that sold me. But in addition to voicemail transcription, SpinVox will also let you call a number and dictate a blog entry. My wife would love this feature-she's a blog diva. SpinVox will also let you call a number and dictate a memo to yourself and then send it to you email inbox. I can think of a friend who would love that feature (Ken Brown). And for those of you who use texting for keeping in touch with your friends or work groups, you can call and dictate a text message that will then get sent to your contact list all at once. I would have loved this feature when I managed for T-Mobile.

That's a pretty sweet package of features. If you've found yourself attracted one of these features, now you're thinking, "Okay, how much?" Are you sitting down? You can surf on over to SpinVox and sign up for your first year for FREE!!! Really, that's not a joke. It's FREE! You don't even have to give your credit card number. I've been using it for about a week now. They can probably charge whatever they want after the first year, I'm hooked!