Jott yourself a note

I’ve been using a new reminder service, Jott. I call a toll free number, leave a message, and it shows up in my Jott inbox (and also emails me a copy, but that’s optional).

Couldn’t be easier. Once I had it available to me, I found myself thinking of ideas or tasks, momentarily considering how unlikely it is for me to remember, and then opening my phone and making the super-short call. Other than using up cell phone minutes, the Jott service is free for now.

The magic it uses to translate my voice to text isn’t really that magical. Though Jott does some machine transcribing, many messages are typed out by humans. They keep a copy of your message so you can go back and see what you said. In one message, I said “JC,” but the phone connection hiccuped and it came out as “AC.” There also have been a few times where words or phrases weren’t included, but they were usually extraneous (so removing them was smart!).

If you’re worried about privacy, you can turn off transcribing. You’ll still have the voice recording, but I think you’d be missing out on the real power of Jott. You’d be better off just buying a voice recorder pen.

On the other hand, if you don’t mind someone transcribing possibly private communications and you receive a lot of voicemails, check out this post on voicemail transcription, which the author calls “a lifechanger.”