Jott for BlackBerry is live
Jott is one of those deceptively useful services for mobile phone users that can make your phone far more useful than it is without it. What makes Jott so great is that you can create text reliably without using that darn phone keypad. You call a number that Jott gives you when you create an account and you call it up when you want to email someone by voice. You set up the contacts you want in your list and speak the name of the desired email recipient. Then you speak the text of the email and Jott accurately transcribes it into a text email and sends it the designated target. It is fast and very reliable and can be used in innovative ways.
Many Jott users send "notes" to themselves this way which gives them a written transcription of their voice note. The clever folks at Lifehacker have even outlined a method to use such voice notes with Evernote to provide searchable notes strictly using Jott. Like I said it’s deceptively useful, you don’t realize how much until you try it. That’s why it’s exciting that Jott for Blackberry goes live today so we Crackberry addicts can use Jott like everyone else. What makes this Blackberry version of Jott cool is it integrates totally into the great Blackberry email functionality and you can send voice emails straight from there. Jott for BB is free as it’s in beta but will be a paid service after that so don’t wait.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Jott for me got a lot less accurate after the first week or two. My theory was (and still is) that as a new subscriber Jott sends most of our messages to a human transcriber.
After the initial period, most of mine seem to run through voice recognition which to me was a lot less reliable.
Jott’s cool – just not accurate enough that I continued to use it.
Jott is one of those things that has just gotten better and more useful for me, with it working with Google Calander, Remember the Milk and now Evernote, along with e-mail.
My experience has been a bit different than Wayne’s – maybe I have just got to where I speak better. I do think transcription is at least checked by a human if not done by a human. I frequently include the spelling of names or “difficult” words – those spelling pieces are never included in the transcribed message and the names come out spelled correctly when I would normally bet that they would be misspelled, usually phonetically. Also the accuracy, while generally quite good, seems to fluctuate somewhat randomly – I’ll get a bunch of Jotts transcribed perfectly and then get a simple one that is botched – makes me wonder if I drew a new employee for that transcription.
Regardless, give Jott a shot – its probably one of the few uses of cell phone that might keep you out of an accident.
How does this work with specialty translations, say in the medical field. Imparticular, if I want to take some voice notes a medial subject that includes words like “cirrhosis, or olfactory gland?.”
Thanks.
Lukasz, here’s a Jott transciption I sent myself:
I think I might have cirrhosis up my olfactory gland.
This came out better than I thought it would. What’s interesting is the word “up” should have been “of” – the words “cirrhosis” and “olfactory” were simply pronounced and not spelled out.
For your notes, Jott only gives you 30 seconds for each message.
Lukasz: I’m not in the medical field, but I was very disappointed with the translations of my technical messages. Unless the transcription is close to 100% accuracy, I would NEVER use Jott (or any other so-called voice to text service) for business or other important stuff. But I suppose the screwed-up translations are tolerable for personal messages. I like proper spelling and grammar, so I was annoyed by Jott overall. I just don’t see the value here. YMMV.
Jott uses some automated speech recognition within their service, but their CEO did say the actual message transcriptions we’re done purely by humans:
“But for now, 100 percent of Jotts go through a human being.”
- John Pollard, Jott CEO
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=18462&ch=specialsections&sc=telecom&pg=2
The MIT Technology Review article continues to say the audio files are being transcribed by a call center in India, but that was a year ago.
Still, it’s a cool and useful service, regardless. I was impressed with the speed and accuracy when I was using Jott.