Back in 2010, Google bought the most powerful flight search engine on Earth. It's called ITA Matrix. They branded it Google Flights and put it in front of everyone. The original is still out there, and I'll tell you how to use it in a moment. Google Flights is a booking site. You know that. It wants you to buy. ITA Matrix does not sell tickets. They only give data straight from the airlines. One search pulls up a full month of fares. Every airline, every airport, within range on both ends of your trip. Not only the big hubs near you, smaller airports too. And you might save hundreds by landing in that smaller airport only 30 minutes away. And before you book anything, ITA Matrix shows you the actual fare rules. Right there up front. Is the ticket refundable? Can you change it? You'll know before you pay. The site? Matrix.itasoftware.com. It's free, no accounts, no catch. Get my newsletter at GetKim.com. Next up, a call from my weekend show, The Kim Commando Show. Enjoy! Let's see. Tom in Seattle, Washington. You're up next. Welcome aboard, Tom. Well, thank you. I've been listening to you for so many years, and I thought I would reach out for a problem that you might be able to know, because you can network with a lot of things I never come in touch with. Okay. Well, lay it on us. So I with volunteers in public service with the Linwood Police Department We have shifts we go on to every day with three to four hour shifts two people in the car one person responsible I described to write down the narrative Whatever comes up whatever we see Okay Well some of us including myself have absolutely lousy penmanship I still do cursive. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I think we all have lousy penmanship now. I gave my fiance a Valentine's day card and she said, I'm finally able to translate your writing. It's like chicken scratch. I should have been a doctor. Exactly. I should have been a doctor, but however I didn't make that great. What we need is ability to turn in a narrative at the end of the shift. So perhaps voice-to-text to print. I've looked at a few options, and I don't see anything that just perfectly meets my end-to-end voice-to-text type request. Okay. It needs to be really free or cheap because we're all volunteers. not much money involved. Are you carrying a phone? I am. What kind of phone do you carry? Well, we all have at least iPhones or equivalent. Okay, all right. And we have recordings on that, perhaps. So have you tried the voice memos? Yeah. So it would take, this is the issue, it would take a little bit more than some practice to get that fine-tuned because somebody has to activate the recording, and then we need to transfer that to text, and then we do the text to the printer. We don't have access to the intranet at the station, so it has to be privately here We can because the firewall is huge you can get into that okay what you could do is you could because you just said like you have to open up the app you got to you know translate it or you know put it in you know transcribe it rather into text is that apple has something called shortcuts and i don't know if a lot of people don't haven't really tapped have you ever tapped into shortcuts yeah i'm messed around with them okay and so it's kind of like you could program your own phone to do certain things and when you hit a shortcut it would start recording it would uh put a time and a date stamp inside that file okay it would it would transcribe it and then drop it into a notes document that from there you could have it save as a pdf and then print or just print from the notes file i like it and that would be you could have it triggered by a physical button on your phone. Oh, that's true too. Right, Kim? Yeah, you can. Good call. Yeah. So one of the buttons on the right or left-hand side of your phone, you can say, instead of this button, turn on the flashlight, I want it to. Or the back tap. Yeah, that as well. Yeah, you can do a back tap. So when you tap the back of your phone twice, that shortcut would enable, and then you'd be like, I'm Tom. I know. It's going to be so wonderful. I was like, this would be the cat's meow if I can get this pulled off. It has to be simple, straightforward, and easy to hand off to the next person. We don need a lot of techy stuff because these people aren techy inclined if that makes sense Well yeah but you guys are doing a great service You are So you volunteering So what made you volunteer That's a fun question. I was originally kind of had a chip on my shoulder with the local police department. When I investigated what they were doing, what are they up to? I discovered that they're overworked, underpaid, and need a lot of help. So I had some time. I just thought I'd give them some of my time. So I studied up for it and I applied and they said, yeah, come on board. Now I'm a team lead. Are you really? Wow. So you went from being a skeptic to a big proponent. Well, everybody has issues with the police department, especially if you're on the wrong end of the ticket. Now, I'm guessing when you went from volunteer to team lead, they doubled your salary, right? Exactly. Oh, I knew it. Triple. Oh, triple. Wow. What a department. That is amazing. That is amazing. Well, Tom, try setting up using the shortcuts app for Apple. And I love that idea of using a side button or back tap so that this way when if something, an event does happen, that you're able to just tap, tap, and then everything will just happen according to plan. Thank you so much for your call. Hey, want to stay in the tech now without wasting your time? 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