Magnetiq

Todoist is an awesome, minimalistic task management service. The voice-to-web service reQall, which is a free alternative to Jott, also does a fairly good job at task management. However, I wanted to stick to Todoist and bring voice input capabilities to it. I used reQall’s e-mail forwarding along with Todoist’s HTTP API and my awesome hosting provider’s powerful features to create a quick mashup.

First, I created a new project (category) called “reQall” at Todoist. This is the default project where new items that I create through voice will land. I discovered the unique ID of this project through the following Todoist API request:

http://todoist.com/API/getProjects?token=my_secret_token

I configured an e-mail alias on WebFaction to pipe received messages to a Python script. The script parses the e-mail, extracts the subject (which contains the transcribed text) and posts a new task to Todoist, under the “reQall” category, with priority 1 and today as the due date (so that it grabs my attention and I triage the task as soon as possible.) Here’s the Python script:

#!/usr/local/bin/python2.4

import sys, email, urllib

print 'reQall Router invoked'

msg = email.message_from_file(sys.stdin)

content = msg['subject'].split(': ', 1)[1]

print 'Adding: ' + content

query = urllib.urlencode({
    'token': 'my_secret_token',
    'project_id': 579713,
    'priority': 1,
    'date_string': 'today',
    'content': content
})

res = urllib.urlopen('http://todoist.com/API/addItem?' + query)

print 'Response: ' + res.read()

For the time being, this setup works quite well for me. When I think of something while driving, I pick up my cell phone (very responsibly!), use voice dialing to call into reQall, utter a sentence and hang up. The transcribed text (sometimes with funny interpretations) lands as a new task under the “reQall” category on my Todoist account.