The Reminderator

To the best of my knowledge, this is not a real product. I actually envisioned something like this several years ago and wrote up a web page about it, but I can't find that - either it got deleted somehow or it just never got indexed well; I have searched long and hard but cannot find it.

That's OK. Times have changed quite a bit since I first had this idea. I thought of this as a separate device back then, but obviously now it would be software for a smart phone. What frustrates me is that this should exist, but I do not think it does - I can't find it, anyway. The closest I have found is this Vocal App, which is very close but still isn't quite what I have in mind.

Here's what I'd like to see:

I choose my Reminderator app and say "At nine AM tomorrow, remind me to call my sister". I don't have to do anything but speak; voice recognition knows that this is something I need to be reminded of at a specific time. I should be able to use phrases like "tomorrow", "next Tuesday", "a week before Christmas", "every other Monday" and so on. The software should of course warn me if it cannot determine the time or if it is in any way ambiguous.

When 9:00 AM rolls around, it should remind me in whatever way I have specified in Preferences - speech, vibration, visual alert. When it does that, I should be able to say "OK"  or "Later" (which might trigger it again in five minutes) or "Reschedule Ten AM".

Of course I would always want the option to do the same tasks with typing.

I'd want some other voice command like "Review Today" and "Review Next Week".

A "Find an Open Hour" would be nice for the busiest of us. When reviewing future schedules, I would want to be able to say "Forget That" or "Reschedule". If I said nothing more than "Reschedule" (did not specify a new time), the event would go into a special queue called Unscheduled, which I could call up with "Review Unscheduled".

I could send something directly to that queue by saying "Unscheduled get brakes checked".

In a similar vein, I'd want a plain Remember queue. That's for things you just want to remember that will never be scheduled and have no date attached to them. "Remember it was George W who got us into this mess" - not that I'll forget that.

There is absolutely nothing here that is beyond current capabilities. If you know of an app that does this, please let me know. If you don't and want to write one, feel free to steal my ideas. If you feel guilty after you get filthy rich, you can send me whatever amount you will assuage your conscience - or nothing at all.

Are there other things you'd want in an app like this? Let me know in the comments.

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