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Show Me What You Jott, Baby!

Two days ago I posted about Jott.com, a new service that transcribes voices messages into text.

I told you my head was spinning with ideas.

Well, in our little world here, we (in this case, Steve Zehngut And I) like to run with ideas until they die on their own. So, in that spirit we set out to test whether or not Jott.com could effectively be used to write a new kind of blog content delivery system that would allow blog posts to be "written" in real time. The notion of "in the moment" blog posts intrigued me.

Well, it worked.

Every post in The JotBlog Experiment was created by using Jott.com's ability to transcribe your voice messages into text.

Jott.com's John Pollard and Shree Madhavapeddi were extremely responsive to our requests for input on how to make it work correctly. And John their CEO spent a good deal of time on the phone with me today bouncing ideas back and forth. In the end, we had to find out own solution, but as Mariana Wagner said in a comment on the previous post, "I cannot stress how impressed I was with Mr. Pollard and how he dealt with this."

This is not flawless.

Jott.com is still in beta and the transcription is not always 100% accurate, but we think it's close enough even in it's present form. The added benefit of this kind of content creation is that the voice that created it gets linked to the content. There's an added personal connection value to that!

This was painless once we got it configured correctly. My head is still spinning and I plan on keeping The JotBlog Experiment up and use it to blast ideas on it's use. Feel free to peak in!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this little experiment?

Posted by Jeff Turner on 03/21/2007 02:50 AM

Comments (103)

jott, blog, experiment, blogging, email, jeff turner, realestateshowscom

Originally posted at: Turner's Perspective: Show Me What You Jott, Baby!

Post is included in group: The Hubba Clubba...ROAR!

103 Comments on Show Me What You Jott, Baby!

MAR

2007

NICE! I am going to check out the JottBlog Experiment ... I will return.

Im back! So, you were able to Jott directly to your blog? How? I use the Wordpress platform as well and would love to know what plug ins I would need to make this a facet of my blogging life. And, yes, the audio option is so cool!

I'm amazed at the accuracy of the transcription! Jott even edits out the uhs and ums. This opens up blogging to a whole group of people who for whatever reason cannot use a keyboard. The only potential issue I see right now is can the text be edited verbally once it has been transcribed?

MAR

2007

Mariana, the Wordpress Plugin you need is called Postie and you can find it here: http://www.economysizegeek.com/?page_id=395

We have not tested this, but according to Shree Madhavapeddi from Jott.com, those of you on Blogger, MSN Spaces, Live Journal and Typepad, the post via email should work without the reformatting issue we faced with Wordpress. The standard install of Wordpress strips classic html from emails, so the Postie plugin allows you to set options to allow the htim content. You can also set the default category the post falls into.

John, the text can't be edited verbally once it's been transcribed. At that point, you'd need to edit it manually.

Jeff, what are you going to think of next? I feel like a kindergartner in an advanced physics class.

I ditto John's comments, and I'm starting to see the possibilities. WOW! I Love your ingenuity with all this technology.

I see you have already addressed the question of how the system handles uh and um, but what about pausing while recording, or linking several recordings into one longer recording, is that possible?

I'll have to check this out and the call me button...

Thanks
Martin

John and Martin, I'm just taking what someone else built and applying it... the rocket scientists are at Jott.com. We're just flying the rocket and thinking about all the cool things we can do with the rocket. :)

I spent a long time on the phone with Jott's CEO today and some of what he told me was under a verbal NDA, but I can tell you that the feature set will be improving and expanding in the not to distant future. Right now, you have a 15 second limit and you can't append recordings together. For the time being, this is perfect for short "in the moment" thoughts and ideas. Martin, I'm out most of the day tomorrow, but perhaps we can get together on Thursday?

Looking forward to finding the time to play with this.

Laurie, thank you. I was looking around the web and found that there was someone else in the world (imagine that) thinking along the same lines today. http://blogwithjott.blogspot.com/2007/03/jott-5-steps-for-using-jott-and-browser.html

The post is their instruction on how to do this inside Blogger. :)

Hmmm your head was spinning? How well I know that one!

Ok, so I have a title you can use for something about Jott.

How's this?... "Hit Me With Your Best Jott!"

So thanks Jeff... it's 5:11AM and you got my brain cooking already!

Jott It Forward.. (Geez there's another)

This is going to take blogging to a whole new level. I can see Landlord Man ducking the bullets and posting the adventure to the web real time.

Jeff when do you sleep? We really appreciate your fascination with technology and your willingness to share with us. This sounds like a cool tool and I will look at it when I can find a moment. I know you will keep us up-to-date.

Ok Jeff, I'm sold. Wait, it's free. Free is good. So much to learn. So little time. I'll find time.

Jeff,

Another new thing for me to investigate. And free at that. Thanks for sharing this.....Now all I need is the time to check it out. Won't be this week!

Wow! This certainly brings a whole new life to blogging. Effective storytellers can interject the emotional feel into their content.

OMG! This is going to be such a great tool for my husband who does motivational and instructional speaking. He is sooo old school with writing on legal pads (faster than typing for this wonderful man!)..then getting the secretary to transcribe....I am going to impress him.

Thanks for the cool find Mr. Turner !

Jeff,

I think it is a good idea, I am always interested in this type of new age platform.

Please keep me informed about any patches that might be out on this ,I gather there are still some bigs to get out from the beta version.

Wow! What a great idea! I will have to take a closer look into this later today.

I love it! Since I do my best thinking (and have my best ideas for blogs) while I'm driving down the road (well, I am a Texas gal and even when we're not real estate agents we do a LOT of driving), I'd already thought Jott would be perfect for saving them until I could turn them into an actual blog. This is gonna be fun! (Hmmm, wonder if Jott can transcribe "gonna" accurately . . . )

Hi Jeff... I just checked out the site and listened to the audio. This is absolutely amazing. So I would be able to use this on my own blog? There are a million questions running through my mind. I will wait to see if some get answered by other members.

{SVW Hubba}...

Okay then. Now that you've taken all this to the next level I see where I may be able to use something like this.

The only problem I have is that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around all this 'new to me' technology.

One question. How private is all of this? Is there someone behind the scenes reading what's been transcribed?

I'm from the old school. The "nothing is really free" is stuck in the back my busy head. SVW...

TLW...ROAR!

Jeff, I had included your original Jott post in the week in review as I saw the potential. But I had not had time to check it out further. It blows me away! This is such a coooooool thing! I have a great little memo recorder that holds 5 hours but I still need to transcribe it. yukk. I love how Mariana just RAN with it. such passion. Here I go trying to hobble behind her =)

This site is very cool. I signed up and will be testing it out. Thanks

Jeff,

Thanks for the post. I have bookmarked this to go the distance in testing it myself. Now on a more serious note, is there some metamorphosis afoot here? Alas have the socially conscious based posts given way to a new AR technocrat? :-)

very cool tool... I remember when Dragon Naturally Speaking came out way back with WordPerfect. Then IBM released something... I felt that they were very long on promise and short on delivery. This product looks like a much better system!

TLW- that is a great question. The transcriptions are "kept" somewhere- hummm. Who and How..? This "tech stuff" gets me as well! Trying to hold on tight, seems like this train gets faster and faster!

Hope you have a great day!

Jeff - that's pretty Amazing - Mariana got your wheels spinning I see! Did you ask John and Shree if they could do anything about my accent? I've been sending e-mails to Rick about appointments and other things to his blackbery and he calls me cracking up and what the system translates some of my words to. At least we are having fun! It's a really powerful tool!

It is kind of funny. I used to be in the telecommunications industry. What we did was just the opposite. Our voice mail equipment could send the voice input out as a wave file so you could listen from anywhere. In addition to that, we could take speech to text and send it to your PDA so you could read it anywhere. And, like Jott.com, we weren't 100% accurate either.

Jeff T. .... wow.... soon we'll be blogging underwater. This is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing this information with us. This is stuff that I would probably not come across if it were not for Active Rain. thanks

jeff b

I absolutely LOVE that I can count on finding the latest and greatest in real estate-applicable tech news here. Bookmarked to pursue in a quiet moment, Thanks!

Ooh. Tomato.

I just set mine up......super cool idea especially for scatterbrains like myself. A Jott Blog will be a great thing especially for people that hate typing for long periods of time.

Jeff - thanks for staying on the "bleeding" edge - I'm still playing like crazy with your awesome Real Estate Shows and blowing my friends and neighbors away with that - now to have this....never a dull moment, huh? Seriously, thanks for taking the time and energy to do the research and bring us the "tools" - Gracias!!!!!!!!!! P.S. I set up my Jott acount too!

Very cool stuff, Jeff. Thanks for sharing. Love the JottBlog Experiment. I set up my blogger email so I can try Jotting to my blog. Will let you know how it works

Jeff

Neat stuff, Jeff. It keeps getting better and better.

All, I'm out on the road today, so I'll be testing the quality in various situations. I just did a Jott Post from Starbucks here in Chatsworth, California to see how it transcribes "starbucks" and "chatsworth." I have a hard time believing it will know these are proper nouns and should be capitalized, but we'll see.

William Collins... socially conscious posts coming. :) I've been doing a lot of writing on one of my other blogs, StopChildSlavery.com. Lots of stuff swimming in my head and not enough hours in the day to get them all out and run a business at the same time! But boy am I enjoying myself...

Jeff, I'm very interested to see how this turns out. I'd love to have this service available to me. Thanks.

Hi everybody,

great to see the response to this. We will keep our eye on this space for feedback, and make sure that Jeff gets a heads up on our new releases.

If you want to write me directly, I'm jpollard (at) jotts.com . thanks!

John Pollard

CEO, Jott.com

John, thanks for stopping by. I'm out and about today and will be updating The JottBlog Experiment site from various locations today. I'm having lunch with Dustin Luther, Pat Kitano and the boys from Sellsius today. Maybe I'll have them do a couple. :)

Jeff,

Just as a though, it would be very cool to call a Telephone number leave a message that can be transcribes edited, posted and e-mailed

The telephone number would be an E-Scribe that is virtual with a Profile of options

1 - Save to Draft

2 - E-mail it to xyz

3 - Blast it as a SMS

Here's why the transcription is so good:

"If we were dealing with a very limited set of words, in a known context, spoken very clearly by a accentless person in a noise-free environment, then pure machine-driven Speech Recognition might have been the way to go. Instead, we wanted to be immediately useful and simple to adopt, letting any English speaker jott using an ordinary cell-phone, their natural voice, in a realistic setting (their car, running between meetings, etc.). So we use a mixed Human/Machine method for transcription, and that blend will change over time." - John Pollard, CEO, Jott.com

Quote from this article: http://www.entrepreneur27.org/archive/interview-with-john-pollard-of-jott

Mitchell... good suggestions. i know the gang at Jott is watching this string... so comment away!!!

To Billie's question about privacy...

The human part of the transcription is being done by agents of Jott Network on the other side of the planet who don't know your name, account information, etc. They are not able to store or rerecord your jott, and they work in a monitored environment with "clean" desks (no writing materials, etc.).

But I understand your concern. If you left a jott that said "this is Billie Tutas, my SS# is xxx, and my bank account info is yyy", then yes, it's possible that this person over there could memorize the information, and later do something with it.

We have a lot of Lawyers using Jott, and they are rightfully pretty concerned about privacy. So far, we've seen them take great advantage of Jott, and easily adjust what they say about sensitive information.

Hope this helps..

John...

Thank you for addressing that extremely important question.

I will delve deeper into all of this and with Jeff's help I'll figure out how to use Jott.

My best,

Billie :)

TLW...ROAR!

Jeff, Gotta tell my friend, you turned me into a Jott junkie, and I infected three teen aged daughters (Note to John Pollard - sorry about that. Hope you've got lots of transcribers working with those three in the loop). When I read this my first thought was, still is, "curses, what a day to be in the office and to have forgotten my cell phone in the charger." That will probably make my manager happier though.

So, any thoughts on if it will become possible to access Jott through land line, tie into our cell numbered account, and still use the service?

I would love an answer to that question as well...

TLW...ROAR!

Thanks for the link up there! So how did you get rid of the [Jott] or [Jottcast] in the title?

Also, I'd definately pay for expanded service - ie. longer recording, customizable messages, etc. I'm just not sure how much. Also, some type of "linking" capabilities would be excellent... if that got implemented, I would never blog with anything else.

Amazing technology! Jeff don't blow a brain gasket on this. The possible applications of this are huge. Thanks for sharing.

Jeff, How do you even find this stuff ? ! Sometimes I feel like the world is spinning faster than I could ever move. I going to stay tuned in and ride in the wake of the Jeff Turner speed boat !! Brian

All, once you've set up your account with Jott, you can add other phone numbers to access the system through, not just your cell phone. I set up my office phone to use it as well.

To the question about multiple phone numbers:

You can add multiple phone numbers to your account, including landlines. The only issue will be whether Caller ID is blocked (or not presented). Sometimes PBX systems don't expose that information (as I'm sure you've seen: sometimes you get a call, and there's no Caller ID, or there's just the area code). No Caller ID, no jotting from that number. It's on the list to have an option there, but right now it's down a ways.

Hope that helps.

John

John, thank you so much for addressing our concerns. I have another question. What happens if I register my office number and someone comes after me and tries to register it as well? Will the system tell them that number's assigned already? I have a feeling this may be the case so I am quickly making my way over to Jott.com to set up my account! This is an incredible tool!

About the office number: there's really no way for us to deal with that right now unfortunately. We have some ideas, but honestly you probably don't want the pooled number jotts going to your inbox .... unless it's a shared jott inbox... Not the most elegant solution to group collaboration :-).... and we like elegant solutions....

Thanks,

John

ahhh, so am I interpreting your answer correctly to mean that more than one person can register the same number? Jeff has given us too many toys to play with this week. I'm becoming frazzled.

JT - I tried it with Blogger on my Fans of Coastal San Diego blog and it worked like a charm. Then I went in and edited the post to give it another title (taking out what JOTT adds automatically)that I thought would be more meaningful to readers. Easy.

Jeff

Sorry Maggie, no, only one person can register a number.

John

looks kind of cool. I blog real time with pictures and text and a mobile blog that I have. up until a couple of days ago I was posting several pictures a day by phone real time. I type so much faster than I talk that I am not sure I could even use blog jot, it would slow me down. is it for mobile blogging or for people that don't like to type?

If I had the time to look into this I would...

It looks interesting.

I had to come back and share this. I set up the account and recorded my first message "Hi, I am really excited about using Jott."

I just checked my email and had received this: "Hi, I am really frightened about using Jott." I busted out laughing! I hope it's not an omen of some sort.

Must be that nu yawkah in me. Maybe I should try some marbles in my mouth...

Maggie... I'm cracking up right now! That's why I called it The JotBlog EXPERIMENT! :)

Jeff: I am off to play with your discovery! What about spell check--and second and third edits?

MAR

2007

Do you know any technology that will allow me to read my post into it and people can hit a botton on the post and hear it in spoken form? Now that would be my blog voice!

Jeff-

Thanks for the great post and your testing...another blogger friend of mine had mentioned this in passing...but your post brought it to top of mind...I am off and Jottcasting...freaky, I love it. Talk about true transparency, your true self...imagine a service using streaming vid also. Soon and very soon we are moving to the Holographic image just like star wars....I'll be sending and shipping to all my little zeeps.

Wow! Technology is amazing isn't it?

That is really cool. I sometimes use the word version. I can write a blog while cleaning or doing bills. I just do a quick read and spell check to double check.

Jott is great. It really has some potential to change the immediacy of blogging. For the road warrior - it is a great tool

John Pollard, the CEO at Jott.com, just used Jott to Blog to write their most recent post on their blog. It points folks here. You'll notice they are on a Typepad platform, so it works there as well.

Wow, I'll be very interested to see how this all plays out. Way to get your mind around using a new tool to your advantage!

MAR

2007

Jeff, I got so excited about Jott that I forgot to comment on this awesome simple but huge achievement. I tried it and I liked it.

While driving..just dialed the number several times and left myself messages, left myself phone numbers. It really works!!!

Went out to dinner with a group of friends tonight and every one of them signed up.

This is a real WOW, a real AH HA!

Keep us posted!

Margaret, I will... I'm going to keep posting thoughts to the experiment. New features will be launched very soon. The JottBlog Experiment was picked up by FutureLawyer, you can see their thoughts here:

http://futurelawyer.typepad.com/futurelawyer/2007/03/the_jottblog_ex.html

{SVW Hubba}...It's down for maintenance. Any idea when it will be back up?

Oh! Wow...

The comment I just made was #7000. Whoa. That's a lot of comments. I'm going to link to this post in my post about my comment record :)

Would like me to leave you alone now? Okay. I'll go bug someone else. SVW...

Elderberry? Ben. I just got done telling you to knock it off :)

TLW...ROAR!

I just got this email from Jott:

Dear Jotters,

We've had an amazing couple of months at Jott, with a ton of buzz and feedback. We've seen great press, including the Wall Street Journal, Law.com, Yahoo! Tech, Lifehacker.com, Informationweek, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Times and many others.   Jott's been hailed as 'insanely clever' and a 'godsend'.

Best of all, Jott's being used for a huge variety of things: hard core legal work to sales to blogging to rapping. It's what we dreamed about.

I'd like to thank you for your business.   You've been a big part of our evolution.

Soon, we are rolling out a much improved version of Jott. There are small changes and big ones, and of course there is a long way to go.   But we are confident you will like what you see.   Unavoidably, we need to bring our service offline for some hours. Hopefully this will be done during a time when you don't need us.

After the upgrade is complete, I will send a much more extensive email explaining our new features.    But what you need to know for when we come back up: when we ask 'Who do you want to Jott?', say 'myself' if it's a jott to yourself, and wait for the beep.

That's it.

More later, but in the meantime, I appreciate your patience during our downtime. Thanks,

John Pollard
CEO

<CLICK HERE> Let's see if this works. SVW

MAR

2007

Here is the link to Jeff Dowler's blog post using Jott.

http://fansofcoastalsandiego.blogspot.com/2007/03/jott-hi-this-is-jeff-i-wrote-about-jott.html

John Pollard, I can see many applications for this technology in the medical world. Voice recognition software hasn't been very good for infrequently used terminology. The voice quality is so clear!

Hanging out here on Active you find all the new toys and applications. Very cool stuff. Thank you for sharing with us.

MAR

2007

All, we've updated the look of the site. We did it mainly because we intend to keep testing this as it develops and we couldn't stand looking at the nasty design any longer.

Jeff,

Like Sue, I also see uses for this in the medical field. How about a speed dial "jott" number in each patient's room. Each nurse, doctor, caretaker, family member and maybe even the patient could jott all updates. Each medication could be recorded, each treatment , IV change, I&O charting, etc.... The time saved, the accuracy, the cleanliness, etc...... The possibilities are endless.

Now you have my head spinning!

MAR

2007

Margaret, I forwarded your comment to John Pollard at Jott. BTW, I decided to add my twitter friends timeline to the jottblog experiment sidebar. I'm still not sold on the value of Twitter, but it's getting some of my attention since most of the A-List techno geeks are all gaga over it.

This is very interesting. I already record all my ideas on a voice recorder and this will make it real easy to just put on the blog strait away.

Jeff, I just signed up with Twitter. If it is right for you, I will try it.

I would love to see what John has to say about the medical ideas.

MAR

2007

I'm an active reader of Scobleizer, and a fan of Robert Scoble's book Naked Conversations, so when he commented on The JottBlog Experiment in his Twitter stream tonight... I felt a bit giddy. Here was his comment...

”Thanks @ResPres for the Jott blogging experiment. I gotta try that (cell phone blogging). http://tinyurl.com/2sgyqr ” 7 minutes ago…

Which reminds me, I added TwitThis to The JottBlog Experiment and a Friends Timeline Widget in the sidebar... Twitter meets Jott. I like it.

You can get my Twitter stream here.

You are out of control! ;) Now you can blog during your hour long commute to pick your kids up from school!!!

Trust me... I have already. :)

APR

2007

Okay, I'm hooked and ready to throw out my little recorder that I had to listen through tons of crap to get back to the reminder I was looking for!

MAY

2007

It's really really awesome to see Jotters out there! I didn't know how wide spread this thing was! I'm along on the wagon with the Jott drivers out there....what useful tool it is while stuck in traffic and you want to Email yourself or a friend and you don't have your computer in front of you! As for me, I use it for musical purposes. I use it to remember guitar riffs when I'm not at my guitar...because I'm FOREVER forgetting my ideas! The Jott Experiment is by far the best use with Jott I've seen. I hope to see more uses for jott in the future. I'm really excited to see what Jott has in store for a non beta version.

MAY

2007

Chris... I agree. I've begun using it in conjunction with Vitalist. I just haven't had time to write about it. The combination of the two is a real powerhouse for me. It's changed how I manage ideas and to do lists.

MAY

2007

Jeff...I have read your experiment and your uses with Jott and Vitalist and I'd have to say that you really have something going! I found out about Jott through a friend and I was instantly hooked and decided to surf the web to see how popular it was. Being from Washington, I thought it was just something locally but BOY was I wrong! I'm no computer geek or guru, so all of these implementations I'm seeing are just mind blowing! I'm thinking of asking the Jott members if they are willing to make something musicians can use. I sing to my Jotts a lot and transcriptions don't like "loud noises" haha. Anyway...keep up the good work! I may have to hit you up to get schooled on how to make a jott blog. Yours is awesome!

MAY

2007

Chris... glad you liked it. We've had fun with it, though I've had less time recently to focus any on it. As a blogging tool, I think the Jott.com solution will have more utility once they go to longer than 30 second record times.

JUN

2007

I love jott. I have found it to be VERY accurate

JUN

2007

Brad.. obviously I do as well. I've played a lot with it in terms of blogging and their exec team has been very helpful.

AUG

2007

Great post on Jott, it's a great service. I recently discovered that they will be rolling out a business model here pretty soon. Hope their service continues to catch on and continues to be great.

AUG

2007

Stephen... you're right, it is a great service. I'm very interested to see what they come out with in their business model.

Wow! I'm always amazed at the latest and greatest stuff that is out there. Thanks for being a pioneer and giving us some of the latest information.

Tammy... Truly, it's my pleasure. It's a great service if used properly.

AUG

2008

Did anyone ever develop a plugin for WP.org?

Missy... not that I'm aware.

Missy... the JottLinks pages list Wordpress and give you instructions on what to do if you want to send a jott to your self hosted worpress account. http://jott.com/jott/wordpress.html

"If you are hosting your blog locally, provide the URL of where the xmlrpc.php file is located. For example, if the xmlrpc.php can be found at http://url/xmlrpc.php, enter http://url next to "Blog URL:"."

I know Jeff is talking but all I hear is BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH....very similar to a different language

LOL!

Jeff, Did you know you were the 100th comment on your own post?

That's funny. I did not. But I am now fully aware that this is number 102. :)

All the old posts are coming alive again today. Missy was my 400th comment on the Do you SEO today! The native must be restless.

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