New Ubiquitous Capture Tool

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debmiller

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As I mentioned in a post I did a few days ago, I’ve just recently become active on the forum, although I’ve been using GTD for about a year. I was scanning through old threads and found one titled “Ubiquitous Capture Tool” that I’d like to comment upon, as it relates to my business. I am somewhat hesitant to post this, so, please note, I’m not selling anything, just asking for feedback.

My company is testing a product to work with perhaps the most ubiquitous tool we have – our cell phones. As David says in a couple of places, the car is an excellent place to do a mind sweep. A cell phone is one of the few tools we can use while we’re driving. To get things off your mind, you just call the product and tell it what you need to remember. Tasks and appointments are recorded, transcribed using voice recognition, and placed directly into MS Outlook, ready for the next steps of processing and action.

We’re testing the product until Nov. 15 and then will be making decisions on what to do with it. Feedback from GTD’ers on the go would be invaluable to us in our decision-making. I know from scanning the forums that a number of you use PDAs and voice recorders. I’d love feedback both from those who have other tools, and from those who only have a cell phone. If any of you would like to try the product, you can go to www.pensieve.com and click on register.

I’m grateful for any and all feedback.

Deb
 
neat idea.

however, I wonder how accurate the Voice Recognition is?

if I did use this, another thing I would like would be the ability to download my recordings in mp3 format.

hmmm, and it would be neat if i could dictate it to send an email.

i think i would use it if it wasn't too expensive. off the top of my head, it would have to be under $30 / month (unless there were a bunch of other cool features... but definitely no more than $50 / month)
 
TesTeq: the product has the ability to be made multilingual, but we are still early with it, so only support English at this time. Sorry.

Remyc88: Good questions. Accuracy depends on a number of things (like cell phone signal strength), but in our testing with a decent signal, it's about 80-85% accurate. Not good enough for person-to-person communication, like an email, but for many people it's good enough for notes to themselves (like tasks). If you said "Call parents about gift certificate for Sarah" and it got "call parents about get certificate for Sarah", you'd still know what you wanted. We also include the recording of what you said so that if it isn't close enough, you can fall back to that. The recordings are currently in wav format, but we have a change planned to turn them into mp3 format. And right now, we're thinking it would be quite a bit less than $30/month.

Thanks for the feedback!

Deb
 
Intriguing idea. I often use my cell phone (plain vanilla type) for that purpose: I call my office voice mail or my home answering machine and leave myself a reminder. Your product would eliminate one inefficiency in that system, which is that, when I get to home or office, I have to listen to the message and transcribe it somewhere else. I would be interested in your product (though I use Lotus Notes/Palm and not Outlook; syncing with Palm would be ideal). Would be helpful if the user could specify categories, priorities, etc. for the reminder. Would be helpful for To Do and calendar items.
 
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that the best place for a mind sweep is not behind the wheel of a car. "On moving XYZ project forward, I need to meet with June & Charlie to discuss the ... *&%#@ CRASH".

I believe people need to concentrate on driving. Isn't it bad enough that people are so distracted by cell phones already?

On the plus side, I like the technology and the Harry Potter type company name. But I don't believe mind sweeps should be conducted when the mind should be involved in operating a vehicle.
 
TPorter2 wrote:
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that the best place for a mind sweep is not behind the wheel of a car.
Click to expand...
I do not agree with you. There is plenty of time to do a mind sweep if you are in a traffic jam (very common in Warsaw and many other European cities) or if you are travelling via not-so-crowded intercity highways.
TesTeq
 
I have to agree with TesTeq. I don't see any danger here at all. If I can talk to someone in the car with me, why can't I talk on a cell phone. All my key phone numbers are invoked with one-button access, so it's pretty safe. The thing that makes me nervous is women putting on make-up in traffic. Yikes!

Last night I "trained" the Pensieve program to recognize my voice. I then did some testing. I was using a landline, which I would think was less likely to suffer from a poor connection. I found the accuracy to be about 60%. It was still close enough to know what I was talking about.

I'd like to see the capability to override the category. By default, it uses @@Pensieve. I'd like to be able to add my other categories like @Call, @Computer, @Errands, etc.

I'm going to keep testing. It looks promising.
 
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