A phone reminder is a reminder which is sent to you over the phone. It amazingly makes various things in your life more manageable which otherwise would stay mismanaged because you simply forget about them. Life is busy for everyone in this age, and with so much going on, it is very easy to forget many important tasks and chores.
VisionVoIP is one of the very few providers of this wonderful service, through a very simple, easy to use and user friendly interface. I use it on daily bases, and am kind of addicted to it. I have setup various monthly, daily and weekly reminders on it which I receive via phone, email and text messages. Anything which I consider important, I immediately make a reminder of it at VisionVoIP. It is kind of my personal assistant which keeps track of my schedule.
This service from VisionVoIP is not very well known yet, and it’ll take time until it gets recognized, unless Angelia Jolie or Megan Fox start using it, and make it famous more quickly.
Here I shall describe how their wonderful service works.
Sign Up
First of all you sign up, as you would for any service. It is pretty simple, quick and painless process. You click on the ‘Register’ link on top right corner of the page, it’d pop up a dialog box and ask for your email address and timezone. Time zone is important, otherwise your reminders will not be sync with your real time.
- VisionVoIP Telephony Services – Registration
Registering your phone numbers
For security purposes, by default this service doesn’t allow to receive reminders on any number. Otherwise a spammer can type in your number and spam you with unwanted messages. There can be other misleading calls generated to people not sign up to receive these calls. So it is important that you register the numbers where you want to receive your reminder calls.
Its a simple two step process which you do in your ‘Profile’, by clicking on the Profile link on top right of the screen. This will pop-up your profile information. Here click on the link [Add a new number]. Now the screen will look like following:
- VisionVoIP’s Phone Reminder service – Phone registration dialog
As you can see here, at the very bottom it gives you a field to enter your phone number and click on the ‘Get Validation Code’ button. How it works is that you enter a valid 10 digit North American number in this field, and click on this button. In a few seconds you receive a call on this number, and it tells you a 4 digit validation code, something like 1348. In the meanwhile on this screen, your number is appeared in front on the Phone Numbers title, with a field to enter your validation code, and click Register. See the screen shot below:
- VisionVoIP’s Phone Reminder service – Dialog box for registering a phone number
Once registration is successful, the number will be added to the registered phone numbers list.
If for any reason you don’t receive the call to get the validation code, e.g. you are trying to receive call on a cell phone and the signal is not good, you can click on the Call button and a get the call once again.
Setting up reminders
Sample reminder screen shot:
- VisionVoIP’s Phone Reminder Service – Sample Reminders Screenshot
Once you have at least one number registered, you can start setting up reminders. For this go to the Phone Reminders section by clicking on the Phone Reminders link top of the screen.
The Phone Reminders section has a few simple and straight forward fields to setup a reminder. Each field is accompanied by a help icon hovering on which will display you details about that particular field. Refer to the following screen shot.
- As you can see, it has Date and Time field which when you click, a pop-up appears to select year, month, day, hour and minute.
- Next is Reminder Type. There are different types of reminders you can setup here. Most commonly you’d use Text-to-voice, which is you type in a text message, and it’ll be played to you in a computerized voice. But if you prefer to have a reminder in your own voice, you can select Your own voice option. In you already have your recorded voices, you can pick one from Pre-recorded voice option. Although the service is called phone reminder, but it also gives you option to use Email and Text/SMS way of receiving the reminders if you prefer that.
- So moving on, assuming that you decided to stay with Text-to-voice message, you go to the Reminder Message field and type in a message in plain English.
- Now you have to pickup a number in Receive At field where you will receive the phone calls. On a new sign up, you won’t see any phone number listed here, except an extension 200. We shall discuss is a separate post what is this extension 200. You need to add your phone numbers in your Profile, which is described above.If you want to test your reminder message instantly, to hear how it’d sound, there is the ‘Test‘ button right in front of this field. Clicking on this button will generate a call to your phone, where you’ll listen to your message. Note that standard calling charges will still apply and deducted from your account.
- Next, there is an optional field Connect to. This is a wonderful option. Lets say you want to remind yourself of calling somebody, e.g. calling your real estate agent at 10 AM in the morning. So first you setup a reminder message for 10 AM, something like ‘call mike’, and then in the Connect to field type in his phone number. Now the reminder call will play you text ‘call mike’ and then give option to connect to his number. This simply makes calling Mike much easier in one go.
- Once the reminder is all set, you can also setup a Repeat on it. It is useful for the reminders which you need to be repeated to you. For example, taking a medicine every night at 10 PM for two weeks. So you setup a reminder for 10 PM, and setup the Repeat option to Daily and Frequency to 14. The Frequency option appears once you setup a Repeat option, which could be Hourly, Daily, Weekly or Monthly.
- When you are done, simply click the ‘Add this reminder to the list’ button, and the reminder will be added to the list.
Modifying a reminder already in the list
Now that you have added a reminder, and want to modify it, .e.g change the date or time, or the message itself, etc. VisionVoIP has made it simpler than you can imagine. You can just click your mouse where you want to make a change, and change it right there. After making a change, click your mouse somewhere else on the screen, and your change will be updated. You’ll see the changed field flashing in blue, to tell you that the change you made is accepted.
Deleting a reminder message
Deleting a reminder is just a matter of clicking on the dustbin icon left of the reminder.
The reminders which are already executed, are marked with a strike through line, colored gray and are not modifiable. They are not deleted unless you actually delete them manually. This is so that you have a recent history of reminders in case you want to refer to them.
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