Kenny Schiff, small business owner, writesin Small Business Computing that he searched for a Web tool “that would let me focus on the meetings and not on taking notes.” He thinks he may have found it: “I recently discovered Cogi.com, a service that provides Web-based applications for call recording and transcription.”

Cogi subscribers can record phone calls, conference calls, personal memos and meetings from any phone or from an iPhone (News - Alert) app, Schiff explained, adding that they “can then choose to transcribe the entire call (or meeting) or just the important moments.”

How does one do that? Choosing what gets transcribed “involves clicking a button within the application or using the keypad of a phone that is registered to the Cogi system. An iPhone application lets you record the audio from live meetings, along with the same transcription workflow. There's even a way to use any speakerphone to record live meetings.”

This reporter is thinking about how much time that would have saved early in his career. Oh well. Plenty of other things that could have been done to save time weren’t, so it wasn’t all the technology’s fault.

Cogi can be run from its Web site and a phone alone without installing any software, Schiff says, adding that “the iPhone application operates separately and distinctly.” Subscribers also have the option of installing a cross-platform Adobe Air-based application to manage and trigger calls, he says, “which initiates the call to your own telephone (desk phone or cell phone), and then to the receiving party (which you can pick from a list), and bridges it all together.”

It doesn’t use speech-to-text technology alone, Cogi company officials say. As Schiff remarks, “not sure how it pulls it off, but there may be human beings in the mix.” They promise to produce transcripts that are 99 percent accurate. Schiff tried the service, pronouncing the transcription “remarkably accurate... There were some minor inaccuracies in the transcript, but no worse than traditional transcription services I've used.”

Transcription is not handled immediately, it can take up to 24 hours. “Subscribers can opt for three different monthly plan levels with no long term commitment,” Schiff says: “Cogi Lite costs $4.95 a month; Cogi Standard costs $24.95 per month; and Cogi Premium costs $49.95 a month.” The iPhone application is available in for $1.99.