Google Voice, Skype or TalkTalk

Image via WikipediaThis morning, when I logged into my Google account, I got a little pop-up ad saying that I had $0.1 Google Voice credit. Prices seem cheap and I want to see whether it will be worth me using GoogleVoice instead of Skype for my calls. I have already posted a comparison of VoipCheap, Skype and Gizmo here. It looks like Google have set themselves up in direct competition with Skype so I am going to try to work out when I would be better off using GoogleVoice.
We tend to call friends and family in Mexico, France, Norway and occasionally Spain.

Prices in pence per min incl. VAT

Table	GoogleVoice	SkypeOut*
Mexico (Landline)	6.5	6.4
Mexico (Mobile)	12	20.7
Mexico-Guadalajara (Landline)	1.3	2.1
Mexico-Mexico City (Landline)	1.3	1.4
Mexico-Mexico City (Mobile)	12 ?	20.7 ?
Mexico-Monterrey (Landline)	1.3	1.4
France (Landline)	1.3	1.4
France (Mobile)	9.7	13.2
norway (Landline)	1.3	1.4
norway (Mobile)	13	13.8
spain (Landline)	1.3	1.4
spain (Mobile)	12	17.7

There's very little in it when comparing calls to landlines but Google Voice does seem to be cheaper when calling mobiles. I will check sound quality but unless it is way better than Skype, I will stick with the devil I know.

Getting Evernote to OCR for you

Evernote is a great app that lets you make notes, take photos and screenshots, bookmark webpage and syncs everything so that you can access it from any computer, iphone or ipad. What I love about it, is that when you take a screen shot, it uploads the image to its server and tries to OCR the text, even hand-written text. Although technically speaking, Evernote doesn't actually do OCR:
"Evernote's image processing technology is a bit different. We analyze the image to generate a set of possibilities for each word that we see in an image. Each possible interpretation is given a score.
For example, we may look at a word and decide that this word may either be "clue" or "due", and we can assign a score to each possibility. This set of scored possibilities is stored in our database for searching.

As a result, there isn't a simple text representation that you can use. Instead, you can search our database to find the image based on the different sets of possible interpretations for each word."

Well, there is a way to get to that OCRed text (or data interpretation). You can find it in the files in Metadata/com.evernote.Evernote. Just in case anybody was wondering.