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Reminder service ReQall is launching a new "professional" service aimed at business users. The service, which costs $2.99 a month, or $24.99 a year, lets users integrate their ReQall tasks and reminders with both Outlook and Google Calendar. It also organizes and groups together tasks and items by location, and has a new memory jogger tool that guesses which of your tasks will be forgotten and gives you an extra reminder.

Of all of the features, the calendar integration is likely to be the most alluring. It lets you use multiple devices to manage upcoming tasks. It also makes it easier to use additional third-party scheduling services without having to worry about having to re-enter the data in ReQall.

The memory jogger is also a great idea, although could be hit or miss depending on how good you are at keeping to your schedule. Proper planning on your part can help avoid missing a deadline or forgetting to do something, although a good nag at the right time is what the service is all about. For now the tool employs SMS messages, e-mails, and instant messages to send these alerts, however only pro users get access to SMS. Apple iPhone users can expect to see a move to free alerts once Apple releases firmware 3.0, which has free push notifications for applications baked-in.

Another feature included in the pro service is e-mail integration that lets you create reminders by sending an e-mail to a private ReQuall address. It pulls time and date information from the context and lets you click on it to jump to that person's contact information or map location (kind of like the iPhone does). It also pulls out names, phone numbers, and addresses from ReQall items based on the contact list on your phone, which is now accessible through the app.

Not to be left out, free ReQall users are also getting some new goodies like a new contact management interface, and the capability to make recurring events then share them with contacts who are not ReQall users.

Previously: ReQall 2.0: Now somewhat smarter

Slideshow: New version of ReQall (iPhone version)

If you're not the type of person to carry around a notepad or voice recorder with you, there are a handful of Web services raring to help you out if you've got a mobile phone. ReQall, a service that launched back at Demo 07 has a great new iPhone application that does just that. I got in touch with Sunil Vemuri, ReQall's chief product officer who showed it off during one of today's CEO pitch sessions at the AlwaysOn Summit.

The application's killer feature is that it saves your notes both locally and to the cloud. It also sends these notes to ReQall's servers without using your voice minutes--that is as long as you can note down everything you want to say within the 30 second allotment. Previously you had to type them in to nix having to make a phone call. Vemuri says the service will transcribe them in just a few minutes, but since launching with the app store a few weeks ago, that time has gone up drastically--leading to some negative reviews. Vemuri told me they're working to get the time back to just a minute or two.

Another nice feature is the "Memory Jogger," which will pop up one of your upcoming reminders when you shake your phone in order to get you to start thinking about it ahead of time. It's fun, silly, and makes use of the device's accelerometer. I honestly doubt many people are going to use it, except by accident, but it sort of doubles like a flash card tester.

The new application is definitely a step up from the Web version that launched back in early March. It'll let you swipe back and forth between things noted in time, things, and people categories. One thing that's missing, though, is integration with the phone's built-in calendaring tool. This is due to a limitation in Apple's iPhone SDK, something Vemuri hopes will be changed in later revisions. For now he says a good workaround is to subscribe to the calendar feed provided by ReQall in your Exchange-compatible e-mail client.

Reqall's iPhone app gets around the issue of using your mobile phone minutes to make notes by sending your reminder as an audio file instead.

(Credit: reQall.com / QTech Inc.)

Aide-memoire service ReQall, which I first tested a year ago, is getting a 2.0 update. New features will make this clever application more useful. Now, when you type or speak an item to remember, you can also help ReQall file it away for you by using certain keywords. For example, if you say, "Buy milk," the service will put that to-do on your "shopping list." The service also understands time: You can specify items for "tomorrow" or for specific dates. You can also share items by saying, for example, "Ask Joe to look into Megacorp." It helps if Joe then has a ReQall account; if he does, the item will appear in both your lists. (See also: BaseCamp.)

There are other to-do list products (such as RememberTheMilk) and even others that parse English (IWantSandy). What makes ReQall different is that it allows multiple inputs--not just text--and outputs for your lists. You can speak your items to the ReQall phone number, put them on the Web site or widget, or connect via text message or instant message (that's new). The service acts as both a storehouse for your items and as a reminder service. It will remind you via an IM or e-mail on items you need to remember. There's also a pretty new iPhone interface.

ReQall makes it easy to keep daily reminder lists.

In my test of the beta, I found ReQall 2.0 easy to use but limited in its understanding of English. You have to know what keywords will set off its automatic categorizing and time-slotting. For example, when I entered the text, "Remind me in 10 minutes to prep" it did not seem to recognize what I was asking for.

There's another new feature with unrealized potential: Photographic Memory. You can now send pictures to your account from a Picasa Web account. That's kind of cool, but it'd be more useful, I think, if you could send camera-phone images to your account. For example, if you had a nice bottle of wine at a restaurant that you wanted to add to your shopping list, it'd be useful if you could record it via photo. The upcoming Evernote version may allow you to do just that, and with OCR of the label to boot.

ReQall's sexiest feature is still its speech-to-text capability. You call up the ReQall service and speak your reminder, and it adds it to your flow of notes. I'm still a bit freaked out that the service is human-assisted: If the automated speech-to-text engine doesn't work perfectly, someone might listen to your recording to transcribe it to your account. ReQall's Sunil Vemuri assures me that the transcribers don't get user account information alongside the audio they work with. However, you'd still be wise to remember that actual people might be hearing your words, and that clearly illegal voice notes will bubble up and get attention you don't want.

There's still no visible monetization scheme for ReQall. In the future, premium accounts may get more access to voice transcription services.

I really like all the super-clean, super-simple reminder products like ReQall--in theory. I have yet to adopt one, being a slave to my own hack of a method that involves index cards and OneNote. None of the services I've used so far blend both the quick-and-dirty, access-from-anywhere reminder service we all need, with a good system for recording long-form notes. Evernote may do that, but it's still in closed beta. We'll have a look at it shortly.

ReQall is a telephone-based service that records notes you speak into it. I saw a demo of this service at Demo 07 and just recently got access to the private beta. It's like an automated secretary: You talk into your phone, and it transcribes what you say and sends it to you as e-mail. The service could be very useful--if it learns to play well with other products.

Talk about a late lunch...

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As is, it's still handy. If you're driving and remember something you need to do, you can just speed-dial ReQall on your cell phone, dictate a note, and when you get back to the office you'll see the task in your e-mail. In my tests from a new cell phone, the voice recognition was spot on (I used a Samsung BlackJack, which is known for good voice quality). It took several minutes for voice notes to get transcribed and sent, though, and I didn't try it from a moving car.

And although ReQall knows the difference between tasks, notes, and appointments, it doesn't do much with that information. All voice notes are sent to your e-mail and flagged with their type, but they're not otherwise packaged as appointments or tasks. So, for example, to make a ReQall note like, "Lunch today with Sam," into a meeting, you have to create a new meeting in your PIM and copy the text over. It would be much better if ReQall knew what calendar you used and either sent you the appropriate attachment (for Outlook users) or logged into your Web-based calendar (like Google or Yahoo) and added it for you. Also, note to ReQall programmers: Lunch is usually at noon or thereabouts, not 12 a.m.

Update: I'm told that ReQall's speech-to-text engine isn't wholly automated. "We use a combination of automated speech recognition technology and human transcription," a company co-founder told me. Which means there may be someone listening to your notes and to-do items. Yikes!

Sci-fi time at Demo 07: call in to Qtech's ReQall, speak your ideas and to-do lists, and the service then does smart things with them. For example, if you save a task for a particular date, ReQall will feed it to you when you call in on that future day.

It also does speech-to-text conversion, and can e-mail you your notes, or put them on a desktop widget.

Pretty cool idea. For me, it depends on the speech-to-text quality. Can't wait to try it out.