Seattle-based Jott, a mobile phone service that lets users record and send emails, text messages, and to-do lists via speech-to-text over their mobile phones, today launched a new suite of tools based around popular web 2.0 sites. The new “Jott Links” service lets users interact with websites and online services by voice over the phone.
At launch, Jott Links supports posting to Twitter, Jaiku, Yahoo! Groups, blogging on LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, posting calendar items on 30Boxes, and getting housing “Zestimates” by voice from Zillow.
“The Jott Links feature demonstrates that there are many more applications of our speech-to-text service,” said Jott CEO John Pollard in a press release, stressing that the company has been adding new features based on user feedback. “We continue to be committed to listening to our customers and incorporating their feedback into our service. Productivity, easier communication, and access to information on-line are three themes that our customers have continued to ask for.”
Image taken from Jott.com
I tried out the Zillow service on my phone today. From an end user perspective, using the new Jott Links is a 3 step process after you’ve added the service to your account online. Step 1, call Jott (the service remembers your phone number so there is no login or verification process), step 2, say the name of the service (in this case “Zillow”), step 3, give your command (in this case the street address of a house). Jott then dispatched a text message to my phone with the Zillow estimate for that home, and sent me an email which included a recording of my voice.
Jott has also released an API for Jott Links that will allow developers to create their own tie-ins with the service.
The company also announced other new features today, including folders, which allows people to save speech-to-text notes into specific categories in their Jott account, and signatures, which allows outgoing Jott emails to be appended with a signature file that can include a picture. Finally, Jott announced a notification service, by which users can record events, specify a date and time and receive a reminder by SMS or email.
