Web Worker Daily

Task.fm, the task management/reminder app with natural language input that I wrote about in May, has just come out of beta, promising an improved interface, Twitter and email support, and improvements to the natural language input. As I noted previously, Task.fm’s input was limiting, which would likely frustrate many users.

The input on the new version is better; the particular input that I complained about in my previous post (“meeting with Dave in 30 minutes”) now works perfectly. However, there are still problems with it. For example, if you enter “dentist today at 4:30,” you’ll get a reminder of “dentist today” set for 4:30 a.m. on the current day. Try “dentist at 4:30 this afternoon” instead, and the result is even worse: You’ll get a task of “dentist this after” set for noon. As I noted in my previous post, natural language input is very hard to get right, and unfortunately Task.fm hasn’t cracked it yet.

The new email and Twitter support means that you can enter tasks by sending Task.fm an email or a tweet, so if you really want to interact with your reminder app through email or Twitter and you’re willing to put up with the shortcomings of the natural language input and learn its syntax, it might be an option for you. But given the problems with task entry, I still can’t recommend this app for widespread use.

Have you tried Task.fm’s natural language input? How could it be improved?

There are plenty of great apps out there vying to help the forgetful, from dedicated to-do list and reminder apps like WWD favorite Remember the Milk, to the task and calendar systems in Google Docs and MS Office. New alerts and reminders app task.fm, launching into beta today, aims to be different by providing natural language, semantic text input as a quick way to enter tasks (for example, “dentist appointment at noon tomorrow”). It claims to support alerts sent via email, SMS and phone (through automated text-to-speech technology). Read the rest of this entry »