After trying either to live without Jott or to use an alternative speech-to-text service like reQall (which seemed very unwieldy to me), I finally decided to go back and give the new, for-profit version of Jott a spin. And actually, it’s fine.
The service is still the same — you call 866-JOTT-123 and leave a message, and Jott transcribes it to text — and it appears to work just as well as it used to (which isn’t always so great, depending on the signal strength and your enunciation skills). What made Jott the killer app for me, before it went out of beta, was that the text transcription of voice messages was sent directly to GMail. (Or your choice of several other links.) Some of the links from Jott to the rest of the web are still free (such as Twitter) but the others, particularly all the Google apps, are “premium links” which you can have for $3.95 a month. Having to go to a web site to retrieve my tasks from Jott was just one or two steps more in the collection process than I wanted to do.
But as I said, as it turns out, it’s still OK: Under the “basic” (free) plan, when you leave the voice message, the transcription is placed on the Jott Desktop (a website), but there’s still an email notification sent that contains a link to the appropriate message. I have my email set up to send to a GTD label in GMail, so when I check my GMail inbox, there’s my task, just as it always was — I only have to click a link. It’s not like I have an entirely new inbox to add to my list of inboxes, and that was the main sticking point with the Jott Basic plan.
I don’t know if there was anyone else out there as anal-retentive about GTD as I am who might have been ditching Jott for the same reasons as me, but if so, I’d say it’s OK to go back.
Filed under: GTD, Profhacks, Technology, Web 2.0 , gmail, GTD, jott, productivity
