The Kyle File

This service is unfortunately dead. This post is preserved for archival purposes only.

Have you ever wanted to tweet or tumble from a phone using your voice? How about reading and responding to email? Well, a new service called Dial2do may be able to help. With Dial2do you can do this and much more. Just dial one of the phone numbers they have from 24 countries around the world and use your voice to tell it what you want to do. Send text messages, read and respond to email, send yourself reminders, tweet and tumble, set and hear appointments in your calendar, you can do it all.

Send, Read and Respond to Email

With Dial2do it is possible to have your email read to you. You can even send or respond to a message using your voice, and the recipient receives a text transcription of your message along with a link to the original voice message you recorded. The time you get to record is rather short, so make the most of it. I think they give you about 30 seconds. They also automatically sort your mail last to first, like Outlook Express and Gmail, which is rather counter intuitive, since in my opinion, it's better to read and respond to email in the order it was received, and there is no option to change this sort order. But although it can use a little work, it's a great start. To begin sending and receiving email by phone, just setup the mailbox you want to read from in your account on the Dial2do web site and call the phone number. Then say “email” to send a message or “listen to email” to listen and respond to the mail you have received. Any email account with IMAP access is supported.

Send Text Messages

Not much to say here. It's pretty simple. Say “text” and you can record a text message that will be transcribed and sent to the person you specify from your contact list. A phone number will also be sent to allow the recipient to hear the original voice message you recorded.

Send Yourself Reminders

Always forgetting things? Need a little help remembering something? No problem. Just call Dial2do and say “reminder” to record a reminder. You can also say “listen to reminders” to have the reminders you recorded played back to you. A text transcription of every reminder you record is also sent to your email and saved for access from the web site, so you have it in several accessible places. Again, beware the short recording time. No complete grocery lists can be saved here, but it's good for short notes to self. Once you have completed something you reminded yourself to do, you can mark it complete both from the site and on the phone while listening to it. Over all, a nice feature indeed. I just wish it could be setup to also send a reminder as a text message to your phone at a certain time, but there is an additional command for that which you can add if you have a pingme account that is setup to send text messages.

Set and Hear Appointments in Your Calendar

Keeping track of your appointments is easy with Dial2do. Just say “calendar” to set an appointment and “listen to calendar” to hear your appointments. It's that simple. This command has a selection box for Google Calendar and 30Boxes, but only seems to support Google Calendar based on the rest of the setup options. This may be a glitch in the process of being fixed. There is a separate 30Boxes command you can add if you prefer their calendar.

Tweet, Tumble and More

Shortly after starting to use Twitter, I was introduced to a site called twitwoop. This site allows you to call a phone number and record a tweet with your voice. The tweet is sent in the form of a short message that is the same every time with a URL pointing to the voice tweet. It also automatically retweets your voice tweets to all its followers, and all new accounts are automatically set to follow @twitwoopand receive voice tweets from every twitwoop user. What a mess!

Enter Dial2do. Just add the twitter service to your account and enter your credentials and you're ready to start tweeting and even listening to the 10 most recent tweets from you and your friends. The tweets you send are transcribed and the text is posted along with a URL for your followers to listen to the original voice message you recorded. Your tweet can be the same length as an email or reminder, so if you go a little long, don’t worry. Your followers can click to read and here the whole thing. An mp3 file of your voice tweet is also available for download from the URL given in your transcribed tweet. Say “twitter” to record a tweet and “listen to twitter” to here the 10 most recent tweets.

Love to blog on Tumblr? Go for it. Just don’t make your posts very long, because you only have about 30 seconds to talk. Setup the Tumblr command on your account and say “tumblr” to record your post. I only wish it was possible to listen to the blogs you’re following on your dashboard, but maybe that will be added in the future.

Several other blogging and microblogging systems are also supported. To find out what's available, click the “Do more” tab from your page after signing in.

Listen to Your Favorite Feeds

Want to hear the latest from Lifehacker or Tech Crunch? How about the New York Times or the Huffington Post? Just add these feeds to your account. Browse the “Listen” category on the “Do more” page to find out all the feeds you can hear. Check back often, because new feeds are added all the time. Don’t like any of the choices or just want something else that isn't on the list? You can easily create your own command with the feed URL you want.

Make Your Own Command

Can't find what you’re looking for in “Do more”? Want something else? Why not make it yourself. Just click “Make your own command” and set it up. You tell it what you want to say when you call, give it an optional 40x40 pixel icon and a description. Then you can choose to send an email, post to a URL or listen to a feed. After selecting the option you want, just enter the appropriate information and add the command. The next time you call, you will get instant gratification as your wish is fulfilled by simply saying your new command. Seems like it could go a little further and be more complex, but if simplicity is the goal, it does its job well.

Thoughts and Opinions

I love Dial2do! It rocks! And it’s free! What more could you ask for? Over all, I give it 8 out of 10. Only problems so far are:

• The short recording times of about 30 seconds are good enough for tweets and text messages, but a little short for most other things.
• There seems to be a bug with the calendar command. If you are adding the calendar service to your account, you can choose between Google Calendar and 30Boxes but if you select 30Boxes, it still tells you it will redirect to Google.
• You can only read email from one account. So choose wisely. Choose the account you check most often.
• It seems that if you receive a text message from another Dial2do user, you can’t listen to it with the provided phone number. It simply accesses your Dial2do account, where you can send a text message but not listen to another person's voice message that was sent to you.
• At this time, you can post to Tumblr, but you can't listen to the blogs you follow. This may be possible to resolve by adding the feeds of the blogs you follow, but it would be better to have a feature that automatically updates when you change the list of people you follow on your dashboard.
• transcription still needs some work, and there's no punctuation. But I used Jott last year and even though they said that transcription was performed by human transcribers in combination with computers, their transcription was terrible. Google Voice is even worse, although they have tried to implement punctuation now. Over all, Dial2do's transcription, which they say is a combination of computer transcription and human transcription and quality control, is miles better than anything else I’ve tried so far.
• “Listen to twitter” only gives you the last 10 tweets. It would be great if you could get the last 20 or 30, or maybe configure the number of tweets you want to hear.
• I want to be able to reconfigure the sort order of messages when reading email.
• I want to be able to delete messages while reading email.
• I want to configure email to be read only from the inbox instead of all folders including trash.
• I want to be able to read plain text attachments in my emails, but mine is an edge use case, so I won't spend much time discussing it here.
• Reminders sent as text messages would be a plus.

Although the list of problems seems long, Dial2do is still a work in progress, and is an extremely useful service already. This explains the 8 out of 10 rating vs the list of problems, which to me are minor in comparison to the benefits. And, unlike Jott it's free, and they promise to try to keep basic features free, according to their FAQ. Try it. I’m sure you’ll love it.

Update 9 September 2009

As of this morning, Dial2do's “listen to twitter option is now reading the last 20 tweets. Great work, and fast. Thanks @dial2do!

Update 14 September 2009

Not sure when it was fixed, but the issue with the calendar service and 30Boxes has been resolved. Thanks again @dial2do for the quick work.