Yodal: Digital dictation for smartphones goes pro
Yodal, the new digital dictation service from specialists V7 Technology, has launched for BlackBerry users.
A time and money saving idea for those who use dictation services as an integral part of their businesses, Yodal allows users to dictate documents in real-time, having them streamed to the company’s cloud servers ready to be transcribed remotely. Using minimal mobile data, recordings can be instantly sent via email, while local caching ensures that all recordings are safe even if a mobile or Wi-Fi network outage occurs.
V7 Managing Director Simon Westcott takes pride in the way Yodal ensures the secure wireless transfer of recordings.
“It’s very secure; the servers that we have are backed up doubly,” he said.
“We have a local fail-over within the same hosted environement that the main servers are on. There is a second geo-replicated fail-over in a different network altogether, and so the users will get 100% uptime, all the time. Certainly we havent had an outage that’s affected us yet. It’s highly reliable and resilient.”
Part of the magic of Yodal is in its user interface. The simple main control screen, with its 7 recording and playback controls, belies a complexity to rival high-end hardware dictaphones. All the options for making inserts, overwrites and appendages to your voice notes are available, making it a more flexible and fully featured voice recording program than default voice apps on smartphones or even the likes of Evernote.
Though BlackBerry is the first platform of choice (due to its leading security features, which has resulted in Yodal being adopted by a leading City law firm), Westcott has not ruled out the service hitting other operating systems like Android or iOS. Likewise, a PlayBook version is also being considered.
Just as BlackBerrys are the smartphones of choice for business users, so is Yodal very much a corporate/enterprise aimed service. At £50 a year per user license, it sounds a steep price, but early adopters legal aid firm EBR Attridge already see Yodal saving them an estimated £10,000 in software and hardware costs over three years.
That’s not to say other rates aren’t under consideration; we mentioned Yodal’s potential as a tool for students sitting through lengthy lectures, which Westcott seemed very keen on:
“We’d have to think about the mechanisms for students to prove their status, but its certainly something we’d consider in the future.”
For more information on Yodal, head over to www.yodal.com. A ten day free trial of the service is also available.
