Small Business

Use Google Voice as a Personal Memo Dictation System

By Dave Johnson

Updated on: August 31, 2009 / 11:36 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

About a decade ago, I briefly experimented with those pocket-sized personal digital recorders. I carried one around to take notes and manage my daily to-dos. That proved relatively impractical, but I might have found a far better solution for the 21st Century: It's easy to configure Google Voice to record and transcribe messages for you, so you can treat your cell phone like a free digital audio recorder.

I stumbled across this clever trick for recording notes with Google Voice in Mark Stout's personal blog.

Here's what you need to do:

Since the whole point of this is to quickly get into Google Voice to leave yourself a voicemail, you'll want to avoid listening to a long greeting every time you call. The workaround: Create a new group (I named mine Voice Memos) and then record a very brief custom greeting for it.
Add your cell phone to the group.
Finally, click Settings, Phones, and, under your cell phone, Edit. Click Show Advanced Settings, and set Voicemail Access to No.

Now, when you call your Google Voice phone number from your cell phone (or dial voicemail from an app like the Palm Pre's gDial Pro), you'll hear a brief greeting and can leave yourself a message. That message will be saved as voicemail and transcribed into text, just as I explained last week in Eight Things You Need to Know About Google Voice -- just like if you had a fancy secretary. [via Lifehacker]