Jun 08 2008
Selling Geek podcast #3 - Jott voice to text service
Have you ever been driving to your next sales appointment, when suddenly you hear something on the radio? Realizing that this means a potential sales opportunity, you search frantically for a pen and a scrap of paper. One hand on the wheel, and the other fumbling around in the glove compartment, you take your eyes off the road for only a second… and are surprised when you look back, seeing yourself en route to an impending collision.
Clearly, this is not the best time to be jotting down your ideas.
Jott to the rescue of lost ideas
When do you get your best ideas? For me, it’s usually not when I’m sitting in my office, in front of my trusty computer, or with a pad of paper and writing implement in hand. No, usually it’s when I’m doing something else – driving, walking, eating, showering – it never fails. That’s when inspiration seems to strike me.
And what happens to most of those ideas? If I don’t jot them down, they evaporate away, lost forever. I shudder to think how many of my “million dollar ideas” have wafted away into the ether, never to return.
But now, as long as I have my faithful mobile phone nearby, I never have to worry about losing a good idea. For the last few months, I’ve been using the well-named Jott, the incredibly simple but supremely elegant voice to text service. With Jott, I simply call a toll-free number and dictate a message up to 30 seconds long. The resulting audio file is received by a dedicated call center, transcribed into text, and sent back to me in an e-mail or text message. It’s a very cool thing.
Jott CEO and co-founder John Pollard realized that people have some of their greatest ideas when they’re away from their PCs, and that the only real appliance they have with them almost all the time is their mobile phone. And he’s built a simple but useful system that takes this fact into account.
Jott: more than an idea recorder
Since its inception at the end of 2006, Jott has expanded and enhanced their original concept into a wide variety of links with other popular services, such as a Jott to Twitter link, where short messages are transcribed into a Twitter feed. (Twitter is a microblogging service that is rapidly growing in popularity… but that’s another show.)
Jott has become very popular with professionals on the go – this is especially true for salepeople, who seem to be in transit far more than most.
The best way to illustrate the elegant usefulness of Jott is simply to experience it… (Click on the player button at the top of this article, and you’ll see what I mean.)
You can also send Jott messages to groups of people, provided that you’ve entered them into your account on the Jott.com website. Imagine being able to send a text message about your latest deal to your entire sales team, just by calling Jott, dictating a message, and sending it to “Team” – all without touching a keyboard.
Or, you can Jott a message to yourself, then stand by – Jott will ask you if you want to send that message to yourself as a reminder at a future date and time. Jott will send an email or SMS text message to your phone at that time – it’s almost like having your own personal secretary.
Other Jott links include integration with:
· Internet-based calendars, including Google Calendar and 30 Boxes
· A wide variety of online task management and “to do” lists, including Tumblr, Remember the Milk, IWantSandy, FortyThree Actions, KeepUp, Kwiry, Mentat, Nozbe, Smartsheet, Toodledo, and Vitalist
· Blogging services, including the aforementioned Twitter, Jaiku, WordPress, TypePad, LiveJournal and Blogger
Jott is also becoming a mobile phone gateway for all sorts of other niche applications, including the ability to:
· Get price quotes and information about items on Amazon.com
· Get real estate cost estimates on specific property addresses from Zillow.com
· Leave questions for investigation and response from Mosio’s people-powered research service
· Poll the Recommendr consumer community about favorite products and stores
·Leave alerts about speed traps and get updates on highway police monitoring in your area through the Trapster.com service
· Record business expenses through the Xpenser service
… all this, just using your voice, your mobile phone, and Jott.
As I said, it’s a very cool thing.
Is Jott too good to be true?
So, what’s the catch?
So far, there really isn’t one. Jott’s service is free, at least for now. But Jott’s management team has hinted that eventually, they will probably introduce advertising in some form in it’s free service, or charge fees for access to premium features, or both. For example, Jott recently announced a new service called Jott Feeds, where users can request Jott to read text from syndicated weblog or news sites. Jott intends to insert ads into this text to spoken word service, and share revenues with the publishers.
But today, Jott is no cost and a no-brainer addition to my sales toolkit. It doesn’t require any special software. It’s practically brain-dead simple to operate. And it’s free. What’s not to like?
My only complaint after using the service for a few weeks is that it is not perfect. About one in every ten messages seems to have a mis-spelling of some sort. This usually seems to happen whenever I’m recording the name of a new product or Internet website – and let’s face it, some of those are hard to spell anyway. Now I’ve gotten into the habit of spelling out proper names – bingo, no more mis-spells in my Jott text messages. Having real human beings doing the transcription seems to work exceptionally well. I shudder to think what Jott would be like if its transcription engine was generally automated – that technology has a long way to go before it’s ready for prime time… but that’s another show. I also wonder if the Jott team can keep up with the workload as the application’s popularity rises. And finally, when and how will Jott figure out how to make money – and how intrusive will that become on what is currently a delightfully simple, straightforward service? These questions give me pause, and make me wonder about the future of Jott.
But today, as the summer of 2008 dawns, Jott is just plain cool. And darned useful, too, if you are a busy sales professional. And did I mention that it’s free?
Sales Pro Value Score
So, because of its ease of use, high utility, and (so far) zero cost, Selling Geek gives the Jott service a Sales Pro Value Score of 4.5, out of a possible 5.
UPDATE: Here are some great ideas for using Jott from the Sales 2.0 blog
[...] Twitter is wide open to spoofing (and so is Jott, which we recently reviewed). Spoofing, for the uninitiated, is when other people masquerade as you by falsifying data. As [...]
[...] become relatively unimportant in lieu of new text-based services. We’ve already reviewed Jott, and liked it a lot — we’ll definitely focus more attention on some of these other [...]
[...] to pay monthly fees to get Jott’s most desirable features. (See our earlier review of Jott, posted here, for a full description of the handy transcription [...]
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