Jott, a convenient voice-to-text service

March 26, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

jottlogo.bmpJott rocks.

Jott, a company based in Seattle, offers a convenient new service that lets you speak messages and send them to yourself or others — as a transcribed text message.

Or as a voice message, if you prefer.

Sign up at Jott.com takes a minute, with no hassle. Then all you do is call Jott’s number, 1-877-568-8486. Jott asks who you are sending the message to. You tell Jott (the name of your friend will be contained in the contacts you’ve imported), and then record a message, and hang up. It ends up in their inbox, translated into text. Or you can choose to send voice message instead, by immediately pressing a “1″. The message then shows up as an audio file in their email.

This is a really easy and useful service, and we may be hooked. Here’s the intriguing part: Jott sends your messages to India for transcription. There, cheaply paid workers are listening to your voice message, and typing down the text in an email, which they then shoot off to the recipient. It took us about five minutes to receive our transcribed message tests — and they were perfectly done. A new meaning of the phrase “Passage to India.”

This is perfect for those professional messages you want to send to people, say while driving in your car. You don’t want to bug someone with a phone call, but texting or emailing someone is hard to do • steering with your knees isn’t very safe.

Jott more convenient than Spinvox and Simulscribe. Spinvox is great for people who get power voicemail. It transcribes incoming voicemail, and sends them to your inbox in written form. But we couldn’t get Spinvox to recognize our phone number during the registration process, and besides, it isn’t free. Simulscribe also isn’t free. It asks for more info than Jott during the sign up, and gives you a week’s free trial, but then forces you to cancel if you don’t want to get billed.


Pinger, another service that lets you leave voice messages for people, doesn’t do voice-to-text.

There was a bug in Jott. The contact import process didn’t work for us. Presumably, they’ll fix this soon. It worked when we manually entered our addresses.

So how does the business model work, if Jott pays Indians to subscribe, but offering the service for free? Jott founder and chief executive John Pollard tells VentureBeat he wanted to see how people reacted to the product before charging. Jott plans to support a free version with advertising. They’ll charge for a premium version, for those want to avoid ads.

Our hope is, this isn’t too good to be true. If it stays free, we’ll keep using it, and it may become part of our daily workflow.

The company raised less than $1 million from Draper Richards, Seattle firm Ackerley Partners in Seattle and Skype founder Ziklas Zennstrom’s investment group, Atomico in London.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Check out Zypsy, which uses the same concept as Jott but applied to mobile search. In other words, you leave us a voice message, then we listen to it and search the web on your behalf:

    http://www.zypsy.com
  • Tony
    Great idea - problem is - privacy ? I dont want some Indian listening and retyping my personal messages that are confidential.
  • Tony, good point.
  • Tony
    You need to make sure you don't leave voice messages to your fiancee' to get a pack of condoms on her way back home!
    Last time I checked confidential messages are not to be left on voicemail, are they?
  • rick gregory
    "If it stays free, we’ll keep using it, and it may become part of our daily workflow."

    Sigh. We need to stop insisting on getting value for free. I don't care about Jott's cost basis.. that's their issue. But if a service or a product has value, we should be willing to pay for it.
  • Rick
    The trouble is one guy starts a service of value and starts charging for it. Another guy discovers that he can do the same for free with the same amount of value. The first guy has lost the game and eventually will loose his customers. Thats just the way the world turns out to be.
  • Ray Burt
    This looks like the real thing. Hold on for this ride...
  • I was telling my wife about Jott the other day. She could not stop laughing at me.

    "Jott? Look here. Paper, pen. 'Jot' it down, and you're done."

    I tried to defend Jott, but, after I got through the humiliation, I had to admit she had a point.

    Is it really easier to call some number on a cell phone, have it transcribed by someone in India, get it by e-mail, and have the uncertainty that all those previous steps all happen properly than write whatever you wanted to remember on a piece of paper?
  • Mike
    use your Voicemail. just leave a message for yourself. or spend $50 on a nice, tiny digital recorder? that's almost certainly less than one year of "premium" service. besides, using humans to do the transcription has really bad scaling properties in a number of dimensions.

    as for privacy, if you're clueless enough to use GMail, you already don't give a whizz about privacy.
  • Chris Pancho
    First off...good to see jott users out there! Seems some here don't have much faith in it...but I'll clear some things up.

    Security - yes...we all don't want some wack-o see, hearing, and typing our own messages be it personal or not. But you would think legal issues were first on their mind when this idea of "jott" came about. From my understanding, Jott has seemed to have the issue of privacy and security under control.

    Yes...their are human transcribers that take your voice to email, text, etc...BUT they also have voice recognition software. They integrate both means to make transcription as clean as possible. haha and I noticed people scared of someone from "India reading and typing" their messages. Well the human transcribers are all over the place..not just India.

    A reply to Greg's comment...You can tell your wife that it can be more than just "being lazy". Jott has many implementations. As for me, I use it for remembering guitar riffs when I don't have my guitar on me. And it helps especially when I'm in my car! I've heard of real estate agents using jott, for what...I forget haha.

    Anywho, just wanted to clear up a few things people seemed to be concerned about with jott. Like I said...I've been a jotter for a while and it has brought nothing but goodness to me. Hope ya'll find some good use with Jott and don't feel guilty....YOU'RE NOT BEING LAZY! haha
  • Tony said:
    "I dont want some Indian listening and retyping my personal messages that are confidential."

    But you are totally fine with some american listening and retyping your personal messages that are confidential?
  • I couldn't understand some parts of this article Jott, a convenient voice-to-text service, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
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  • Jott also provides methods to post the transcripted message to a number of destinations, including user-specified URLs, which can process the message any way you want. I use it to post to my blog. If I am away from the computer, I just call the number, say what I want to blog, and it appears on my site within about 10 minutes. As far as privacy is concerned, for this particular application it is a moot point, as the message ends up in the public domain anyway.
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  • vidya
    I have been suffering from carpal tunnel for quite some time now. I found Jott when I was looking for voice recognition softwares on the internet. Jott has worked great for me so far. Thanks to Jott, I dont have to type long emails or meeting minutes anymore.
  • David
    I've used every iteration of time saving devices and the such over the years, I still have an Apple Newton on the shelf...no kidding. I have to say that Jott linked to Nozbe on an Iphone is an increadible setup. I have not touched a notebook or pad of paper in over two weeks. I'm a VP of Marketing & Product, so going paperless is a monumental achievement. For the heavy lifting, I'll use Dragon Speak, but for everything else Jott is excellent. I would pay for this service.
  • Some thoughts:

    1. Why does it matter who does the transcription? Indian, American, Eskimo, Asian, they are all people offering a service.
    2. Voice to text transcription has been used for decades by many professionals and now it is becoming readily available to the masses in a cost effective manner. Our private medical status is often dictated into any number of devices and then sent off to a transcription service (people) who then send the info back to the doctors office. It was not too long ago that I watched this process...it went like this:
    A) Write chicken scratch notes that the doctor can't read.
    B) Look at your notes and dictate into whatever kind of recording device as best as you can a recap.
    C)Send off the tape or whatever to a transcription service
    D)Voice is transcribed by humans.
    E)Plastic sheets are sent back all hodge podge that have the notes typed up on clear plastic stickers
    F)Assistant at office peels these off and places into patient file.

    We have a come a long way!
    3. What privacy issue do you have with Jott or with Google? I know in detail how both services work, have you researched either or did you just jump on the bandwagon with the rest of the security phobes? You might want to do some of your own research.
    4. I would pay for Jott. How much? I don't know, but I would pay per message probably and I am already doing more updates on my blog because of it.
    5. I use jott for quick messages to groups, myself, appointments etc. It is all well and good to say use a pencil and paper, but what about those of us (more and more now a days) that are on the move constantly and multi-task to the Nth degree...to be able to leave a note while I walk here and there saves me lots of time and my time is precious as is yours.
    6. This will be completely software driven eventually...
    7. the possibilities are endless as many services allow emails to be sent to them for various triggers...now you can use jott and use voice commands.

    rant over.