Niche applications don’t always appeal, of course, but sometimes one seems to leap out and suggest all sorts of lateral thinking uses. Such is Voice 2 Mail – the idea is that you tap its live tile shortcut and immediately start talking. Your voice gets compressed and automatically sent to the pre-programmed email address of your choice. In other words, a permanent, cloud-archived record of whatever you wanted to say. Sent to you or, intriguingly, someone else.

Here’s the blurb for the basic application:

Note taking on a touch keyboard is difficult if you are on the go. Why not just talking to your phone?

Pin the Voice2Mail tile to the start screen and click it to take a voice note. One more click and this voice note is saved, by automatically sending it to your email inbox. There you can read your text and hear your voice. No PC connection needed for sending the email!

This way you don’t have to worry about forgetting important things, while you’re on the go.

Now, you can record audio snippets into OneNote, of course, but then you have to tap to find a workbook and folder, tap to record, tap and type to give it a title, and so on. It’s a bit of a hassle. In contrast, with Voice 2 Mail, you tap and immediately start speaking. Then tap one more time and your audio is sent off to wherever you wanted it to go. Which might be your own email address, for handling later on, on a laptop. Or your secretary. Or achivist. Or wife/mum, and so on. As I say, there are laterally thinking uses here.

Here’s Voice 2 Mail in action:

Start the app and off you go (provided you’ve ticked the box in Settings, of which more below) – potentially very handy when you’re on the move and unable to use the phone touchscreen intensively; (right) once finished, sending the audio as an email attachment can also be fully automated. All very clever. 

Tutorial screens do an excellent job of leading you through the functionality and interface – very slick indeed….

In Settings, you’ll need to turn on the auto-recording and auto-saving functions, for best effect; (right) which audio codec and bitrate you choose has a big effect on how large the attachments will be. Most of the time you won’t be worried about actual audio quality (as long as it’s understandable), so go for basic WMA Voice etc.

Note that the emails can go to multiple addresses. For example, you might be on a trip and sending updates through to both company, secretary and also relatives? Coverage permitting, of course! If you don’t have good data coverage, Voice 2 Mail saves the note locally and you can then open it up for adding to later and then trying to send again. 

Voice 2 Mail is a commercial app, but not expensive here. There’s also a ‘Plus’ version here, which adds the facility to add photos and maps to an email, again backing up the idea that you might use this as you’re hiking over some godforsaken mountain range in South America. As you do!