Voice Actions was the catalyst for me to finally got me to root my G1 and put on CyanogenMod 6. When it was first announced, I thought it was weird that the "note to self" command sent an email to yourself. I'd've preferred that it be a calendar entry. Well, it's not that much extra work to get it to do that. Just set up your Google Calendar account to be able to work with their text messaging shortcode, GVENT (48368). Once you've done that, add GVENT to your contacts as something creative like Calendar. Now all you need to do is activate Voice Actions and say something along the lines of "SMS Calendar: Oil change on Saturday at 9." I choose to have it send texts from my Google Voice account, since it'll send a reply in confirmation; make sure you set communications up with GVENT with the phone number you'll be texting it from.
This tip, while seemingly small, reveals that Google Voice Actions can actually do a lot more than what is on the surface. We've featured many of these before—most cloud services nowadays offer SMS or email-based ways of managing them—but the compatible services are almost too numerous to list. Here are some of our favorite examples, though (most require you to enable something on the service's end, so click the links to do so before trying this):
- Add events to your Google Calendar by adding GVENT to your contacts as an SMS number. (Note that there's no direct link to the mobile setup; you need to go to Google Calendar and click on Settings > Calendar Settings > Mobile Setup).
- Update Twitter by adding 40404 to your contacts as an SMS number.
- Update Facebook by adding your personalized Facebook upload email address to your contacts.
- Add new tasks to Remember the Milk by using its Twitter integration. After adding Twitter to your contacts as 40404, you can send an SMS to it starting with
d rtm(example:d rtm Pick up Milk on Monday at 5pm). You may have to type thertmpart manually, but you can do the rest by voice. - Create a new note in Evernote by using its Twitter integration. Text message Twitter with
@myENord myENat the beginning of the message (example:@myEN Grocery list: Milk Eggs Chicken). - Schedule shows on your TiVo, add things to your Netflix Queue, and do tons of other stuff by adding kwiry to your contacts and beginning your SMS with the proper service name (e.g.,
tivo 30 rockto schedule a recording for 30 Rock.
Really, the possibilities are endless, as so many services contain email or SMS support in one way or another nowadays. These are just a few of our favorites, so if you have your own that we didn't mention, share it in the comments.