In our last post we covered organizational tools available on the web. I mentioned the Jott service.
Jott is a free service that allows you to perform various tasks using your voice and your telephone. I think of Jott as a high-tech variation on calling yourself and leaving a voice mail. Jott will transcribe your voice into text and do with it as you please. Currently Jott will email messages as well as interface with Twitter, Yahoo, Jaiku, Zillow, Thirty Boxes, Blogger, Live Journal, Remember The Milk, Sandy, Xpenser, Trapster, BackPack, and many more.
I have used Jott for more than a year – before I began using Remember The Milk or Google Calendar. At that time, I just emailed messages to myself that would later be added to my task list. I use it now with Remember The Milk to note tasks when I away from a computer or paper/pencil. I admit that I have never spent much time using the email function.
The latest product from Jott is an interface for the Blackberry that allows a user to reply to email using voice. Jott will then transcribe the email and send it onto the recipient. Your boss might wonder how you find the time to “thumb” such long replies. Jott has setup a special web site that presents Terse Reply Syndrome much like other syndromes commonly advertised on television. Compare the sites. They look eerily similar.
Is Jott perfect? Absolutely not. It is darn close, though. It has gotten words that I never figured it would spell correctly. Other times it has butchered seemingly easy language. It is usually close enough to remind you what needs to be added to the task list. Email would probably function well if you stick to low-rent verbiage. The largest problem seems to be background noise. Those situations can give you some strange results.
Jott is free, so it is harmless to try it out. You will need to associate it with your telephone number. This way you will not need to sign in when you call. It simply answers the phone and says, “Who would you like to Jott?”