Convergence: Jott is my assistant

As one more sign that the Singularity is coming, Jott.com is offering a free transcription service to the masses.  Well, sorta.  Jott turns any phone into a personal assistant that can quickly and easily transcribe your message into an email and send it to you, or who ever you wish, as long as the email address for that person is in your contacts on the Jott site.

Users signup for the  service, validate their email address and phone number, and then can use the system at will by call the toll-free phone number.  You can just dial, tell it who you want the message to be sent to, speak for up to 30 seconds at which point the service will email or text your message to whom ever you told it to at the begining of the call.  They are using a mix of human and machine translation services to offer you the transcription for free right now, but I can see this being ad supported one day soon.

An email is sent out with your message in it and an embedded link back to Jott where the recipient can listen to the message, just in case they might not have understood something.  I tried it out a few times today and found it flawless so far.  I also imported my entire Outlook contact file and sent out some test messages to some coworkers, all went smoothly.

What is impressive to me is not so much what they are doing or how they are doing it, just that we have people will to make this service and they rely upon the idea of ad supported revenue to make it fly.  Do I think people would pay for this?  Maybe, but not millions of people, no.  But if it is free and you can get a share of the market, like the high school and college crowds, they yeah, it will be something that gets used and therefore has worth in the Internet-based market.

So if you need to remind yourself to get eggs and the dry cleaning on the way home, or maybe you want to tell your partner to call a hot lead, give Jott a try.

The interesting Website of the day: GrandCentral – sticking with today’s theme of convergence, I wanted to share GrandCentral with you.  GrandCentral’s service allows you to seamlessly link all of your phone numbers to one number.  So your home phone, office phone and cell phone can all be reached by dialing one number. Then you can set rules to who rings through to which number or in what order the system tries to find you in.  I can tell the service that when Scott calls me I want him to ring directly through to my cell phone, but if my neighbor calls send it straight to the home number.  Both called one phone number, with different results.  Google acquired Grand Central last July of 2007 and though so far has made little or no changes, I would expect to see the service folded into another offering or just consumed entirely at some point.