The idea for Voice Inbox was born from my personal experiences while working at Microsoft, I frequently experienced back pain that made it difficult for me to concentrate, even right after getting up, and sometimes during the night while I slept. I tried various remedies such as back exercises, massage, and rest, but they provided only temporary relief, and sometimes none at all.

Eventually, I decided to visit the hospital’s rehabilitation unit. After a quick examination, the doctor recommended a series of physiotherapy sessions. Over the course of over a month, I had to visit the hospital twice a week. However, parking around the hospital is no easy task, and the hospital knows it, to mitigate this issue, they arranged for a larger parking lot nearby. Yet those who parked there had to walk back to the hospital after crossing two traffic lights. One day, I got late by ten minutes, and it turned out that I’ve missed my slot for the rest of the day, because there are other patients queued behind me, and it’s near the closing time, I also missed the opportunity to schedule my next visit, that day turned out to be a wasted trip.

After that, I became more careful with scheduling my appointments with the physiotherapists and managing events and alerts on my calendar. Typically, after each session and having scheduled my next one, I would leave the treatment room and add an event to my calendar as I walked to the parking lot, I tried to do it quickly to avoid forgetting or getting the time wrong, While I attempted to use Siri for this, it rarely met my expectations, it failed in so many ways, as you might be familiar with, here’s a typical scenario:

  • Me: “Hey, Siri, add an appointment with my doctor on …(stopped by Siri)”
  • Siri: “What’s the name of the new event?” / “What do you like to be reminded about?”

Siri is able to get the job done if I the user speaks in a fixed pattern and using the voice it recognizes in a quiet environment, however, in the noisy corridor of the hospital or on the street, it had an extremely poor hearing.

While I didn’t expect the hospital to provide a way to sync my appointments to my calendar, I did think my iPhone should offer an easier way for me to do this on the go. And this is where Voice Inbox began to take shape.

Though I mentioned Siri in the post, Voice Inbox is not Siri.