Two Great Assistants - YouMail & ReQall - Make My Life Lots Easier!
UPDATE: Since this post was written in June of 2013, ReQall has discontinued the service described here. Their replacement offering is WAY more powerful and too much for me. I'm still looking for a 'simple to use' replaceemnt for the ReQall I loved... 
Two Great Assistants - YouMail & ReQall - Make My Life Lots Easier!
For my entry into the Your Best TECHO Secrets - that make your Personal and Professional Life Easier! Contest I'd like to mention two great assistants that help me constantly. YouMail and ReQall.
YouMail is a voice messaging service with a personality that replaces standard voice-mail services. Actually, with just a little effort, YouMail can have your personality. YouMail:
- is easy to setup and maintain;
- allows individual greetings based on the caller ID;
- sends a text that someone has called and/ or left a message;
- sends a recording of the caller's message by emailed to you;
- has a Visual Voice-mail interface for Android and iPhones;
- and lots more.
There multiple subscription levels starting from free. By doing nothing more than sending my calls to my account, callers hear a default greeting that addresses the caller by first name (if it is in their caller ID). For example, if the caller ID was John, the message would be: "Hi, John, Bruce can't come to the phone right now. Please leave a message".
You can change this greeting by selecting from the many offered (most would not be "professional" but there are some good ones) or create your own greetings. I've gotten many comments from people impressed that "she" knew their name.
By adding (or importing) your contacts into YouMail, greetings can be specific to an individual caller, a caller group, or several defaults (like handling no caller ID calls). This is helpful in providing personal callers something different than businesses ones; or differentiating current clients from prospective ones. I use it mostly to provide a text notification and a and email with a recording of all messages. They also offer a transcription service (that I've not yet used), with real people doing the transcriptions to be very accurate.
ReQall is my memory helper and organizer. So many times while I'm doing something else I'm asked to check on or pick-up something "later". Maybe it's an hour from now, next week or even monthly. Sometimes it is a place rather than a time (like: ...the next time you're at Home Depot can you look for...). With ReQall, I can add a note, a reminder, o
r a shopping list item with a simple phone call or using the smart-phone ReQall app and just saying what I need to. If you're phone is "location aware", you can setup a location and ReQall will remind you when you're nearby it. Using a few keywords, appointments are added to my calendar, reminder texts are sent at the appropriate time, and/ or a list can be reviewed when needed.
ReQall provides a free version that may well meet your needs for a note taker, appointment maker, and general helper. For $24.99/year, more features are available that make ReQall almost indispensable for me.
When all is said, I don't use either of these tools anywhere near their capacity. Even so, I think they are great and hope my little article gives them justice enough.
Thanks for reading and I hope this helps.
Bruce
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