Jott yourself an electronic reminder

Every once in a while I come across a web site that really tickles my fancy. Today, I discovered Jott, a web site that boasts voice-powered, hands-free Messaging and To Do Lists.

Here’s how Jott works. You create a free account which includes entering your cell phone number. Jott then sends a quick verification text message to your cell phone and asks you to call a toll-free number to complete the account setup process.

Why the cell phone verification? Because it’s the brains behind Jott. Ever been out and about and a thought hits you that you know you will forget by the time you get home? With Jott, you just dial the Jott toll-free number. When it answers you can leave up to a 15 second message. When you get a home, an e-mail from Jott will be waiting for you with the exact text of your voice message.

Jott pulls this off by using real human operators to translate your voice messages to text. So it helps to spell out tricky words or names if you want the e-mail text to be translated without any typos or misspellings. Jott states that the human operators have no knowledge of the person or phone number they are translating but if it still makes you a little uneasy, you can turn the human translation feature off and have the actual audio message you left sent to your e-mail instead.

You can also log into your Jott account on their web site and view all of your Jott messages, a handy feature if you accidentally deleted one of your Jott e-mails or need to recall a previously sent message.

And finally, you can do what Jott calls Jottcasting and send your message to multiple people as long as they all have a Jott account.

One word of caution for noobies. The Jott web site is technically in a public beta state which means it is not necessarily ready for prime time, although I have not experienced any problems so far. I have had strong words on beta products before but my comments have always been intended for beta software that you are required to install on your computer. Since Jott is a web site, there is nothing to install on your computer but it is worth mentioning that the web site is technically still in a beta state.