I’m loving Dial2Do

A Tech article with View Comments posted 15 July 2009.
Tags: calendar, productivity, sms, software

So with my newly acquired cell phone, I’m finding that there are all sorts of interesting applications that I wouldn’t have been interested in before, but am now. I had heard of Jott, a service which transcribes spoken words into text and shuttles it off to different services, but apparently they went for-pay in February. So I found a free alternative: Dial2Do.

I am using Dial2Do for reminders (which are automatically emailed to me for later action) and for help managing my calendar. I have set up Google Calendar to send SMS messages when I have an appointment on my calendar, and with Dial2Do, I can call in to listen to my daily calendar or add new items. So far, the recognition accuracy has been pretty good. What’s really interesting, though, as a web developer is Dial2Do’s ability to set up new connections to web services. With the appropriate home automation gear at home, I could call Dial2Do, tell it to turn the lights on in ten minutes, and Dial2Do would HTTP POST that as text to a web server, which could schedule/execute the command to turn on the lights. It has really fired up my imagination.

So if you use online calendaring but don’t have a smartphone or the money for a fancy data plan, you should try Dial2Do.