If you are excited at Google’s speech-to-text technology on Nexus One, but still have no chance to have your own one. Try “Jott”, a voice-to-text service for any phone on your hand. This service can transcribe your voice into text, and then send it to a destination via SMS texting message, email, or web update. The idea of Jott came from two former Microsoft employees. They found people sometimes have great ideas on the go, but cannot recall them later. To solve this problem, John Pollard took the advantage of mobile phone, an appliance people can have with them all the time, to help people capture their thoughts and ideas without miss. When you come up with some ideas, just call Jott and tell it. It would record what you say and then send a copy of it to you or someone you specify.
To use Jott, you need to open an account and set up some destinations and your message would go in advance. After that, you could use the voice-to-text service as your life assistant. When you call Jott, it will ask you a couple of questions to identify that who you want to Jott and when to send your message. For example, when you’re stuck in a traffic jam and you’re going to miss a business meeting, you can call Jott to send an email to notify your colleagues.
How this service works
If you think of this awesome mobile service resulting from high-end technology, you would make a wrong guess. Basically, Jott saves your voice messages as sound clips on their central servers. Human workers at a large call center in India log onto the servers, listen to the most recent clips, and transcribe them manually. In case a transcription is unclear, every e-mail from Jott also contains a link to the original sound clip for the receiver to check out. Sometimes, the transcribers in India may correct your wrong words in speech to make your message more accurately.
People have waited for the voice-to-text service for a long time. However, speech recognition technology is not ready to satisfy consumers’ demand. Jott’s innovative idea gives people an alternative to enjoy the speech-to-text service. This great idea reminds us high-end technology is good but not the only way to achieve success.
