Thu 6 Sep 2007
So the previous two posts were done from my phone through a website called jott.com.
We met this guy that works for jott at a party a few months ago, and were excited to see what it did. I signed up for it a few days later, but admittedly have never jotted anyone.
Basically what the service does is allows you to make a call to their service, you speak the name of the person you want to jott, and you speak a short message. This message is then translated to text and sent via text message or email to the person. I set my settings on my Jott account to just get a the occasional mailing. If I used it more often I might rethink that. But in this last mailing I noticed that they had integrated the ability to send a Jott to a blog.
As you can see from the two previous posts, the title is always Jott Blog post ( I added the post1, post 2 after the fact). Unfortunately there is no way to specify a title. Also it gets posted to the general category (or whatever you set as your default category). To post to a blog (and there are several types of blogs you can link to) you set up your login information on the jott website. You then call the jott number, when asked who you want to jott you say the name that you have given to your blog in your contact list, it confirms what you have said, and then tells you when to start recording.
The two that I did were a little different from each other. The first one was called a quick jott. So I recorded a message, and then after i stopped talking for a little bit it gave me several options. I hit 1 not really knowing what it would end up as. It posted fairly quickly to my blog and I received a confirmation via text message as well. The first post was only a sound file. This could be cool if you were just adding a quick update or something.
On the second post I was trying out two things. First I wanted to see how long it could be, and secondly, I wanted to get it to do the text conversion. I called jott again, and selected to jott to my blog, and started recording. After speaking for a little bit, I paused to let some time go by, and after what seemed like a very short time, the jott automated service asked me what I would like to do with my call. Basically this means that long dramatic pauses are not compatible with the system as it thinks you are done. So this time I just let the system lay out all my options (quick jott, re-record, new jott) I can’t really remember how I made it select the correct option, but I think I just hung up. The posting to my blog took a little longer obviously as it had to go through another process I am sure. Most of the text was there (and correct) except for one part where I spoke a little too quietly for the system i guess. What is nice is that it also still included the sound file of the post so one could go back and listen to that if the text version was just not good enough.
What I liked about this all, is that the idea of talk to text is just plain cool. Its also cool that the company is here in Seattle. For a texter who is on the go, this service could be pretty cool. Actually we recomended it to this waiter at one of the restaurants we go to who said texting while driving was hard to do with his t-mobile Wing.
I like the option to only upload audio or to do the text and audio.
what I didn’t like about this part of the service is that the post title is always the same. It would be really cool if there was a way you could speak a certain sequence like Title is… post is… or that the service would prompt you by saying, please speak the title…. please speak the post…. or maybe they could add a date or something in there so that if you do end up posting frequently from jott that its easier for your readers to distinguish between the posts. Additionally it would be nice if you could specify a category that it is supposed to be posted in.
Actually it would be really cool if they would make a Wordpress plugin that you could modify in the Dashboard area of a wordpress blog.
Additionally, the audio portion of the posts do not end up being very mobile friendly. On the regular mobile version when I click the link to the sound file it just gives me an error. When I use opera mini 4 it just hands me a blank page. It would be nice if they could make this work better with mobile phones.