My Recent Jott use – True Integration of Web Services
Feb. 23, 2009 by ravishan
As many of you know, I am a big fan of Jott. I know that many users of Jott were not happy that recently they began charging for several of the useful services. I found it to be so useful that I singed up for their $3.95 a month service and have been using many of the extended services to the fullest extent.
For those who are not familiar with Jott, it is a voice to text conversion service. It used to be the case that you called your message in and they will send the equivalent text as an email with a link to listen to your voice recording. I have always been very impressed with the success of the voice to text conversion given my accent (which led Vacek Miglus from the Physics department to comment once that this was because this was an outsourced service where workers in India were listening to the voice and converted them to text!).
But based on some of th esuggestions from the users (including me), they have integrated their service in very creative ways to many other web services. I spent a Sunday to experiment with a few and sign up and this post discusses what I did.
Jott Links provides the framework to link your Jott account to many of the Web Services. Click here if you are interested to learn more. For example, you can set up a Jott link to your Google Calendar or Twitter account. Of course, you need to have an account on the web service that you are trying to link. When you are ready to link the web service to your Jott, you provide an “alias” for the web service and then provide the credentials to authenticate to the remote service. For example, I have a Jott Link to one of my Google Calendars called “Google Calendar” and I have authenticated once to my Google account from Twitter. Once this is done, every time I call Jott phone number from my cell phone, to use this Jott Link, I simply say I want to Jott “Google Calendar”. It is as simple as that.
Google Calendar – When I am driving or walking across campus, I am reminded of certain tasks. I do wear earphones while driving and I have Jott phone number as a favorite, so it is fairly easy to do without violating the cell phone laws. I Jott “Google Calendar” and follow the Google Calendar Quick Add syntax – for example “Send email about ATAC meeting to Jolee at 8:45 AM today”. This automatically adds an event in my calendar, which then sends me a reminder. How cool is that!!! I can actually have different aliases to different Google Calendars. There is also a plugin for Outlook calendar, but it requires a local plugin to be installed.
Twitter – I love this… As many of my Facebook friends know, I update status fairly often. In some instances, I have updated while stuck in traffic (by logging into Facebook from my handheld and actually typing the status). What I recently did was to start using my Twitter and linked that to my Facebook. This way, anytime I updated my Twitter, it automatically updated my Facebook. Just when I was marvelling at this integration, I discovered that now, I can call my Twitter status in through Jott!!! So, I have begun doing that. I have a Jott link and I call my status in. Jott sends the text conversion over with a link to listen to my recording, just in case they were unable to find an Indian to do the conversion right 
Xpenser – We are in the midst of a new Financial system implementation and it is my hope that many of the current processes will become electronic. One of the major issues has been keeping track of expenses while traveling (especially for me who hates paper). So, I have been experimenting ways to simplify all of this. Xpenser I think is a perfect way to handle some of the issues. I sure hope that one of these days, I can simply take a picture of my receipt and send it to myself with a corresponding entry in Xpenser (all from my handheld device) and file them all electronically. Of course, with the current restrictions on travel in the University, this may be moot, but hopefully in the future this will change. So, I set up an Xpenser account and linked it to Jott. My first test “$6.33 at Taco Bell” which registered perfectly!!!
Trapster – Finally, a fun application, that tells you where the possible traffic traps are. On the iPhone, it even talks! This is supposed to be a true social networking application whereby those that are driving by can send in the information about traps – by specifying the exact location that one sees a police car, for example. Of course, by linking to Jott, you can call it in!
There are many more web services that can be linked to Jott this way and if you are interested, you should check this out.
I believe that these are very powerful applications and we need to look at them to see if there are ways that we can take advantage of this. For example, I hear that recording some of the support questions that we field takes time because one needs to sit down and describe it. Wouldn’t it be great if one can call it in while walking across the campus, or from the client’s office and an email gets sent to the queuing system?
I find the calendar reminders to be extremely useful for me. As soon as I remember about responding to an email or write to someone and I am not near a computer, I simply call it in.
If you are a Jott user, please share with the rest of us how you use it…