Filed under: Business, Fun, Internet, Text, Blogging, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, Social Software
Jott : The easy way to send messages
With Jott all you have to do to send a message to a group or even post message to your blog is dial an 800 number. Once connected you are prompted by an automated system to say "Who do you want to Jott?." You name yourself, your blog, a contact, or group and then leave a short voice message with your message. The automated system tells you it "Got it" and then you are free to hang up. Your message is sent immediately to the recipient(s) in text form via email and/or text message with a link available to listen to the audio file if the text somehow gets confused in the translation.
You can import contacts from Outlook, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, and Plaxo accounts directly into Jott making it easy to use the service to email literally anyone. The site uses examples such as being stuck in traffic and emailing your team at work to let them know you'll be late, or posting a blog about a great restaurant you just visited and then emailing your readers to alert them to the new entry.
Signing up with Jott involves picking a username and verifying your email address and phone number. The whole process takes about 5 minutes and ends with you sending your first Jott to yourself. We tried it out with several complex phrases and different email addresses and found the voice recognition software to be spot on with its text version of our voice messages.
One drawback to the service is that you are limited to 30 seconds per message which in cases like blog posts can be pretty limiting but for a service in public beta it is pretty functional and pretty fantastic.
[Via EmilyChang]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
?estion said 6:19PM on 4-13-2007
so does this sidestep texting fees?
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Emily Price said 6:34PM on 4-13-2007
To my knowledge you still get charged for text messages, BUT text messaging someone is optional. You can just use the service for emailing contacts.
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Andrew S. MacIntyre said 6:41PM on 4-13-2007
Great Service! Robert Scoble did an interview with 2 guys from Jott and they disclosed that the service is not using software recognition to output voice messages to text. There are actually live operators typing the messages after a user leaves them. They hinted that it's to your benefit to not disclose private information in your messages even though the operators don't know who the message is from.
Scoble Interview - http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/2409/dont-forget-jott-it-with-your-cell-phone
Andrew S. MacIntyre
MovePittsburgh.net : Pittsburgh Real Estate
http://www.MovePittsburgh.net
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dep said 11:40AM on 4-14-2007
How does one Jott to one's Blog? haven't seen that functionality in there...
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Tim said 11:18AM on 4-15-2007
This is cool, but I'm scared they'll go out of business if they rely on live operators. If I were them, I'd keep a small staff of operators, and have a text to speech program transcribe it, and then run a grammar check on what it spit out. If it doesn't add up, it runs it by a live operator.
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