arghyle

A few days ago I got an email from Jott.com telling me that my beta request had been answered. I don’t even remember emailing them so either they got hold of my email or (more likely) I signed up a long time ago and forgot about it until the message turned up in my inbox.

Anyway, Jott is a service that you call from your cell phone and leave a message for yourself or someone else. After leaving the message the system converts it to text, saves the audio message, and then emails you an alert. Wow- pretty pretty awesome idea. I mean, not world changing, but if you remember to use it Jott could be a great tool. Of course, this is supposing you can’t email yourself from your cell phone, that your cell phone does not have voice notes, and that you are either too lazy to text yourself or you don’t have the discpline to text yourself and then not read the text (thus making it useless as an alert).

If you fall into any of these categories all you have to do is register, save Jott to your phone, and call the 1-800 number when you have a note that needs to be taken.

I have been really impressed with the transcription- it has been almost error-free in a number of messages, even when dealing with tough things like the time and website names. After leaving your message on their phone system (you have about 30 seconds to talk) the system immediately saves it and then it takes a little while to transcribe it.

I generally leave messages when I am away from my desk and I had not been able to time it until, so I just tested it out. I left a full message (I was cut off at the end) of a long paragraph I read and then a string of domain names to test it out. The transcriptions were usually done in less than two minutes (but sometimes took as much as 5 minutes, though one got stuck and never finished), but for long messages it tended to cut them off at 100 or less characters, (though this seemed to vary) which is disappointing, but if they did not cut it Jott would be a free transcription service which would be awesome, but not profitable.

The backend works pretty smoothly, but I accidently deleted a few messages, by hitting the X button, which I thought would simply archive them. No big deal, not a mistake I will make again. Past that it is a pretty cool service and one that works remarkably well. Be sure not to hit the speaker button multiple times, it will play your message each time your press it, even if that means playing the same message four times at once.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS