Jott is a free voice-to-text service designed to help people stay organized and record those sudden strokes of genius that usually occur at the most inconvenient times. Once a person registers on the Jott Web site, an account is created and the Jott phone number is provided. The user then programs the Jott number into a cell phone’s speed dial, and, whenever a sudden idea hits, calls up Jott. A pre-recorded voice immediately greets a person with the question: “who do you want to Jott?” To leave a personal message, the user responds “me” or “myself”. After the beep, the person leaves a message (up to 30 seconds long) and waits for the voice to say “got it”. Once the user hangs up, Jott sends an email or text with the voice message transcribed.

Busy individuals can use Jott to schedule appointment reminders and Jott will give them a call fifteen minutes before meeting time. Jott also can be employed to send email or text messages to other people. By programming names, phone numbers and email addresses of friends and colleagues into a Jott account, an individual can then send emails or texts from a car, bed or beach, by simply stating the person’s name upon calling Jott. All sent messages are stored in a person’s Jott account for later reference, and a person can even access audio files of original voice messages for verification.

Being a free service, one would expect the Jott Web site to be littered with advertisements, but, surprisingly, ads are nowhere to be found. Additionally, the site has a simple layout and registering an account is a pretty quick and easy process. Transcription emails also are fairly quick to arrive (within a couple of minutes of a message usually), and most of the text is verbatim. The exception to this is names and other proper nouns.