jottlogo I started using Jott last week, and I have to say so far I'm really liking it.  If you haven't heard of it before, basically it's a service that acts like a to-do application with a whole lot of other functionality as well.  The nice thing is you don't have to be sitting behind your computer to add a new task, instead you can call Jott and add the task that way.  The transcriber (I'm assuming it's done by a person?) listens to what you say and adds it to your Jott list.  You can also get text and email alerts when a new item is added to Jott which is cool.

So then, say you're on your way home and you remember that you need to fill out a timesheet for work.  You know that chances are pretty good that you'd forget if you waited until you got home, so with Jott you just call the number, say "Fill out your timesheet" at the beep, and you're good to go.  Sure enough if you have email or text alerts enabled you'll get a message which says "Fill out your timesheet" in text.  If you go to the site and login you can even listen to your recording back as well as view it in text.  Obviously they have a nice setup for managing your to-dos, including the ability to have multiple lists for your various needs.

jott-links Where Jott becomes very powerful though, is in linking Jott to other services.  Not only can you add tasks to your Jott page, but it also works with other sites like Twitter, Google Calendar, and Remember the Milk.  I had been using Remember the Milk as my primary site for managing tasks up until I found Jott, so one of the first things I did was start adding tasks to RTM from Jott.  I've since decided to cut out the middle man and just use Jott itself, but being able to add calendar events and new tweets from my phone is awesome.  There's even a Jott link for WordPress so in theory you could leave a voice message to your blog which would be transcribed into text.

So how accurate is Jott?  As long as you remember to speak as clearly as possible in concise statements it does pretty well.  The first couple messages I sent were off by a word or two but once I got the hang of it the errors were cut down quite a bit.  A nice thing about leaving messages is that you can spell difficult words out instead of just saying them and expecting them to be wrong.  My only gripe with that is when I spell words out they will be added with a question mark afterwards.  For example if you were to say "Pick up the m-a-i-l" the actual message might say "Pick up the mail(?)" on your Jott page.  Not a huge deal but I wonder if there's an option to turn that off somewhere since the spelling transcriptions tend to be pretty accurate as well.

The only question left, as with a lot of web 2.0 services these days, is will I be using it a few weeks from now.  Jott is inherently cool, so cool that you might find yourself calling Jott when you could just as easily type out your message and send it to whatever site or to-do list you needed to.  Once the novelty wears off is when the real test begins.  I suppose that being able to leave notes for yourself when you're away from a computer will always be helpful though, so it might just have some sticking power.  We shall see!  As a testament to my dedication to Jott I think I'll try to add a short blog post here using their WordPress link, so look for that sometime later in the day. =)

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