InstantRecall: An app to help you remember the important stuff

It happens to the best of us--you bump into an acquaintance at the supermarket and can’t, for the life of you, remember details about him: where he works, his kids’ names and the like. In the flurry our existence, bits of information such as these tend to fall by the wayside and get discounted as trivialities. But it is the awareness of these little pieces of knowledge that separate the normal people from those that close those big deals, become closer friends and are more respected among their peer groups.

Because the majority of us are not blessed with eidetic memories, help in remembering things about people is always welcome. Enter InstantRecall: an app that, at its core, is surprisingly simple yet effective. It is a tool for daily life that plays the role of a trusted memory sidekick, which nudges out personal information about people you care about whenever you most need it.

The app, only available on Android right now, complements your phone’s contacts listing, the difference being that it enables you to key in additional information that you can ‘recall’ later. This includes details relating to relationships (name of their spouse, children, birthdays, anniversaries), interests (hobbies, clubs they are part of), achievements, education and a host of other such areas. Adding information is as simple as editing a contact--simply tap the contact and add pertinent details. The app can also pull contact information from your contact’s Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ profile, if you enable it to.

You can add details to a contact via the Profile and Notes sections. Profile includes basic identifying information about the contact, while notes can be as descriptive as you want them to be and can also be tagged for easier recall later. Besides keying in information via the traditional keyboard, the app also integrates with your phone’s Google voice recognition system so you can dictate directly into it while it transcribes the text.

As regards recalling the details you’ve saved, here’s where the app really comes into its own. You could fire up the app and search for the contact, but this isn’t nearly as much fun as using the built-in voice recognition: dictate something like “Salman Khan profile” and it’ll pull up Salman Khan’s profile information. Assuming you do have his profile information saved. You can also perform more specific queries such as “Arjun Kapoor notes tagged interests”, and the app will surface just that specific information. Being able to extract personal details via voice is a great feature to have if you see Arjun Kapoor walking down the road and want to quickly arm yourself with personal information about him that will impress him.

The app also has Android Wear integration. If you happen to have an Android watch, the app’s functionality can be triggered directly from your wrist: launch a voice query via the InstantRecall wear app on your wrist, and the relevant details pop up right on your watch screen via handy flickable cards you can browse through.

The app is free to use, with a premium version available that enables creating unlimited notes, creating custom fields in the notes, and displaying LinkedIn profile information.

In our quest to stand out from the pack, forging stronger interpersonal relationships is a huge bolster for both personal and professional development. InstantRecall is a handy, well thought out tool that does indeed augment the ability to access key information at the right time, and actually use it in creating more meaningful social ties.

Find it on the Google Play store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.neurocrunch.contact