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Gordon Bell talks about reQall in his fascinating new book on e-memory

Total Recall is a new book written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell about the inevitability and implications of a complete, personal e-memory. reQall is mentioned prominently.

Some excerpts (emphasis added):

"For spoken notes, I used to use the record audio note feature on my smartphone. These days, I prefer using reQall. With reQall, I dial a certain phone number, and am prompted, “What would you like to do?” I say, “Add,” and then, after a beep, say my note. That audio recording gets delivered to my e-mail as an audio attachment, and a transcription is made of what I said in the text of the e-mail. I find this especially handy when I’m driving: I just hit a speed dial button, talk to reQall, and then I know I will have the note in my in-box to deal with later. I used to forget more ideas than I remembered, but now it’s easy to save them. There’s more to reQall than I have space to cover here. It understands reminders and shopping lists. You can send it messages from instant messenger, and it can send you reminders in SMS text messages. It really is a fantastic tool for e-memory."

"My friend Sunil Vemuri is the CTO of reQall, a really fascinating memory-aid product. I use reQall to create reminders and notes for myself. I call up their phone number and say, “Add.” There’s a beep and then I make some comment, perhaps, “Book the flights for my vacation.” I can retrieve this reminder by calling in later and saying, “Recall,” instead of “Add.” I also get an e-mail, with a recording of what I said, and even a transcription of what I said. Besides using the phone and e-mail, I can use other interfaces like a Web browser and instant messenger. Being able to create and retrieve memos in all these ways is very powerful. I even use the phone to create dear-diary entries: I can be driving along, place a call on my cell phone, and tell a little story that ends up transcribed in my e-mail and also with my own voice recorded."

" ... Sunil expanded my vision of what is possible when he visited Jim Gemmell a little while ago. They sat down in Gemmell’s office and were chatting about all kinds of Total Recall ideas (when Sunil was still a graduate student at MIT he got involved in the CARPE research community, so he’s been a coconspirator with us for years). In the course of the conversation, Sunil made reference to Gemmell’s family, and even what school Gemmell’s oldest son attends. Gemmell had only mentioned this once, and that was more than a year ago, so he was astonished at Sunil’s memory. But Sunil gave up his secret later. “Do you know how I remembered about your family and your son’s school?” he asked. Gemmell shook his head and Sunil went on. “After our last meeting, I called reQall and spoke some notes about our meeting, including those facts about your family. Now, I also have reQall programmed to play random facts to me every so often. Since our last meeting, I’ve heard those facts about your family a couple of times, so now I remember them.” "