reQall–a memory aid for the 21st century

Are you overwhelmed with the minutiae of modern life? Who isn’t? reQall is a service that helps us deal with the deluge of things we have to remember and attend to.

You use it by typing text into the application or speaking into your telephone. The speech-to-text facility is surprisingly accurate in my testing. It has been almost letter perfect in every one of my trials. It puts a similar feature in Google Voice to shame.

A moment ago I spoke the following to the reQall automated telephone attendant, “To-Do Sunday July 25th at 3:30 check reQall see if it transcribed this message.”

I got an email a few minutes later that read, “Reminder for 3:30 PM: To-Do: Sunday, July 25th at 3:30 PM, check reQall see if it transcribed this message.”

I am impressed.

reQall has both free and paid versions (AKA reQall Standard and reQall Pro). Pro costs $24.99 per year or $2.99 per month, and has several additional features compared to the free Standard version.  They provide a free 15 day trial of the Pro version so you can test the service before paying them.

You can use it to set up appointments, tasks, reminders, and shopping lists. The Pro version has location awareness so that if you tell it you want to buy fruit at Costco it will remind you when you are near Costco.

reQall works on Windows and Mac computers. It can be accessed via a web browser. They provide free apps for Android, BlackBerry and iPhone cell phones. You can also set up several landlines to work with the service as well.

reQall integrates with Outlook (both versions), Google Calendar (both versions) and Evernote (Pro version only). If you want reQall will send you text message (Pro version only) and email reminders (both versions). They even provide an RSS feed for your reQall items. You can share your reQall items with people in your BlackBerry or iPhone contact list.

Everything isn’t perfect though. The iPhone app is a bit clunky and the web descriptions and tutorials do not do justice to the elegance of the service. They also do a mediocre job of explaining what the service is or how to use it. I suspect the folks at reQall are engineers and not marketers.

I like what I see. My testing indicates that this service is useful and probably worth paying for the Pro version. I suggest you try it out. I think you will agree.