Thursday, January 31, 2008

Take a letter

Greetings!

Well. Voice recognition software has certainly come a long way since the days of Dragon Dictate (or whatever it was called). Using Jott was amazingly simple. I spoke clearly and distinctly and didn't have a lot of background noise going on which may have helped, but it (she) understood the first time through. Very cool. Remember the Milk also work easily once I scrolled down the list of tasks far enough to find the ones ( I emailed twice because I couldn't see my email the first time) I had added. It would be a useful feature for the most recent addition to pop up at the top of the list-- especially if you were using this collaboratively. I like both of these websites because of their novelty. I'm not sure how much use they would be to me. I was an early user of PDAs and still find them useful and many of the options available online are also available in handhelds and phones. Being able to use Jott is a big plus so that you can just have your thoughts and capture them immediately. I hate to sound lilke Luddite here, but a pencil and piece of paper lets you do the same thing and doesn't cost you a phone call and you can still share those thoughts or ideas electronically later perhaps when you've had time to refine them a bit. I also worry, and perhaps this is because my understanding is shallow, when all my information is stored on-line. I know these servers are massive and there are many layers of built in redundency but still, what if there is a "fire sale" and the whole power grid goes down or just the bit that has my data stored on it? Data does occasionally get lost in cyberspace and I like to have things backed up locally in a couple of places (flash drive, hard drive) so that when power is restored, I still have the data. So, while I think these two things are groovy. I will probably stick with my pda and paper and pencil. Because as all us rats know, in desperate times paper can be an excellent snack food, while little packets of electronic data aren't.

2 comments:

Stef Morrill said...

Great point, Bookrat!

I have to admit that I'm torn on the paper vs. electronic debate myself. I can't make myself give up my paper calendar. I just don't trust it not to be right in front of me in print.

So, I get what you're saying. I spend a fair amount of time transferring things from lists to lists, so I'm still looking for the holy grail of to-do list systems. I don't know if Jott/Remember the Milk is it, and I don't know if I'm ready to completely commit to it, either, but it's interesting to think about....

Jill said...

From a fellow Luddite, I agree with your assessment of RTM and Jott. I'm a paper list gal, too. That said, I am glad they're showing us all sorts of tools in the class and making it easy for us to try them. :)