Lifehacker posted about Jott, and (I think) my Uncle Bob read it, who then “Jotted” my Mom, who then told me about it. But what is Jott? It’s a little bit hard to explain, but I’ll try.
Basically, Jott is an online web service that allows you to call a number on your cell phone, and the, tell it WHO you want to “Jott.” You can either Jott yourself, or one of your imported email contacts (you did this on the computer earlier.) It then records your 30 second message. Then, about 5 minutes later you (or your contact) should get an email with your speech translated to text.
And now you ask: “But is the Speech-to-Text really THAT good?” And I answer: “If only it were so. It’s actually too good, and my sources tell me (my Uncle Bob) that they actually just have people listening to your message and transcribing it.”
So yes, the idea that someone is just “translating” what you’re saying takes away some of the coolness, but this tool can actually be very useful. For instance, you could be in the waiting room for a doctor’s appointment and you suddenly remember that you haven’t sent out Thank You notes yet - but no problem! You just pull out your cell phone and Jott the message to yourself, so when you get home there’s an email waiting for you literally telling you to send out Thank You notes! (Even though it’s already April)
I’ve tried many times to make contact with these mysterious Transcribers by talking to them in my messages, I’ve even played them music - but all atempts have been futile…
I have a quick question. Will Jott stay free after it’s out of Beta? I thought probably not, but if yes, then at the end of this sentence, put two periods, if no, put one period Please do this, it would mean a lot to me, I just want to know
So they go ahead and put no periods!
transcriber enjoy this music, it’s very good music. [inaudible]
“Inaudible”??? That’s it! A “Thank You” might of been a little bit more polite!
Yes, I did read about it on http://www.lifehacker.com/ And it does come in handy. Your mom asked me what hotel we’d be staying at next month when we come to NYC, and the name was buried in some materials in a folder in my car. So the next time I was in my car, I looked it up, and then just jotted it into my cellphone.
A couple of problems I’ve encountered though. I tried to jott a blog entry, but it sends the messages in html formatted email, which didn’t work with the wordpress email interpreter. Also, I set it up to send text messages to family members phones, but it dumps a large amount of the message into the subject line, then repeats the entire message in the body of the text. This effectively reduces the possible length of the text message down to about a dozen words or so, instead of the full 160 characters allowed by SMS (short message service) protocols used in text messaging.
UB