Total reQall
by Imran Ali
Last week I was invited to test QTech’s newly launched UK edition of their reQall service, just ahead of today’s launch.
QTech’s Chief Product Officer and co-founder Sunil Vemuri, is a graduate of MIT’s prestigious Media Lab, specialising in the research and development of technologies to augment and enhance memory; what Sunil describes as ‘memory prosthesis’ and ‘personal memory aids’. Now at reQall, Sunil’s still very much focussed on ‘helping people remember better’.
As a veteran of France Telecom R&D’s Boston labs and Apple’s technology group, Sunil’s pedigree is impressive (I had the pleasure of working with him on a handful of digital music projects at Orange. However, with a board populated by user-centered design guru Don Norman, thinker’s thinker Edward de Bono and futurologist Peter Cochrane the company will really have to try hard to blow it!
Fortunately, they didn’t…the service itself is a ‘digital memory’ tool that enables users to…
- Call a free number, record a voice message - a reminder, note, to-do item, idea, thought or diary entry.
- Have the message transcribed into text and archived online.
- Notifications and digests of archived messages can be sent to the user by email, RSS or SMS.
What’s astonishing is the simplicity and accuracy of the user experience. At no time did I need to repeat myself, my transcribed message appeared shortly after my call (I wonder if this is a human process?) and without typos. I couldn’t quite figure out how to record different types of messages - whether I needed to voice-prompt reQall to differentiate between tasks and meetings or if the transcribe process figured it out.
I’ve long argued that voice interfaces are the most overlooked UI paradigm in mobility - it seems that QTech and the reQall guys not only understood this deeply, but were able to execute a simple, elegant user experience.
Now I wonder what magic reQall’s voice engine and Stikkit’s command-line for life could weave…
