In August voice-to-text service Jott moved out of beta and added a premium feature for $4/month. Since then, the company says, about 30% of Jott’s active users have opted for the premium, no-ads version of the service.
People use it to send voice-to-text emails and sms messages, send Twitter messages, add calendar items, etc. Voice messages are transcribed into text via software with humans to clean things up.
The free version of Jott is going to end on February 2, CEO John Pollard told me today. The terrible advertising market, he says, means every customer has to pay their own way from now on. Customers will need to pay $4/month to continue the service, the current price for a premium account. This includes users of the Jott iPhone application. → Read More
When Seattle-based voice to text service Jott first went live in December 2006 I wrote: “It’s very simple – a user calls a specific phone number and leaves a voice message along with a recipient or recipients (an obvious use for Jott will be for people to leave themselves quick notes). The voice message will then be converted from voice into text and delivered via email or SMS. The recipient or recipients can choose between reading the text or listening to the original voice message.” Things haven’t gotten a whole lot more complicated at Jott over the last two years. They haven’t raised much capital by recent standards – compare their $5.4 million in venture capital to competitor Spinvox’s $200 million. But the company has 420,000 (presumably) happy customers who primarily use it for one of three things: mobile productivity, hands-free communication and web services (voice I/O). People use it to send voice-to-text emails and sms messages, send Twitter messages, add calendar items, etc. To date the company, led by ex-Microsofter John Pollard, has spent exactly nothing on marketing. Yesterday they left beta and released a free service called Jott Basic (beta users are now on that service, and the iPhone app remains free). Premium plans start at $4/month. Most people will be fine with the basic plan. The company also released Jott For Outlook (this is really cool) and Jott Express, an Adobe AIR desktop application. More details on the Jott blog. → Read More
GotVoice is a great voicemail utility that has so far focused on delivering visual voicemail (phone/web), custom voicemail greetings, and broadcasting voice messages (like Pinger). Through some clever coding, GotVoice links directly into your voicemail to pull messages into the system and send messages back out through it. However, the product has been lacking one of the killer voicemail features of their competitors, speech-to-text. Today they’re differentiating themselves from GrandCentral and closing the gap with their other competitors by adding speech-to-text transcription. And adding avatars to boot. Their new avatar system will let you add some personality to your voicemail playback using SitePal’s avatars. It’s sure to come in handy if for some reason you enjoy getting your messages delivered by a bear. Their speech-to-text offering allows you to transcribe voicemails to text for delivery via email or SMS. You can transcribe all your messages, or filter by contact. Transcription is available on their $9.99/month premium accounts including 40 messages a month with additional charges for each message thereafter, although they have a 14 free trial. Spinvox and CallWave also offer call transcription. Spinvox is pricey in the U.S. if you take into account exchange rates, costing £9.99/month for 50 messages. CallWave is currently a good deal, transcribing calls for free during their open beta. → Read More
GotVoice has added two new features to their web based voice mail product: group voice messages from your mobile, and visual voice mail. See our coverage for details on the previous version. The new group messaging feature lets you recorded a message from your phone and play it back over a call to multiple contacts or dump it directly in their email. Previously users could only use the website to send mass messages. Pinger has a similar mass messaging service in its product. The second feature, visual voicemail, is a welcome addition as we get closer to the coming of the Jesus phone. GotVoice will visually enable the voicemail of any phone with a web browser. Users will be able to access their account over the internet, able to see the name of the caller and playback messages out of chronological order. → Read More
When I first reviewed GotVoice in June 2005, I thought it was an awesome, if rough-around-the-edges, application. Gotvoice’s goal is to bring sanity to your voicemail inbox, and it does that well. Tonight they are relaunching with a much cooler interface and a whole bunch of new functionality. Previously GotVoice was a simple service that used your voicemail credentials and turned each voicemail into a MP3 file. Got Voice would then send out an email with a link to your GotVoice inbox. It basically allowed users to move voicemail administration from their phone to their computer. The new features take that basic service several steps forward. First, two phones can now be associated with an account. Also, you can now compose voicemails via a flash recorder in the service (or via your phone), and deliver it to the voicemail of people in your contact list. This is great for responding to messages, or to broadcast a new message to one or more people. Another useful feature of Gotvoice – since it has access to your phone admin via your credentials, you can also use it to change your voicemail greeting. They’ve created a tool that mixes your voice with any MP3 you care to upload. Once you’ve created the greeting, GotVoice will turn it into your voicemail greeting. Finally, the coolest new feature. GotVoice will be launching a stripped down WAP version of the voicemail inbox page for access from a mobile browser. The result is a visual voicemail product that is sure to be the rage as soon as the iPhone launches with it’s own visual voicemail. This page can be accessed from the browser, and GotVoice is working to do deals with carriers in the U.S. to offer this directly as well. What GotVoice isn’t doing yet is converting voicemails to text, something that they say they’re working on via a partnership. Jott and Spinvox do this now, and it is a bit of a hole in GotVoice’s offering. I look forward to the feature being added soon. GotVoice has a free and premium ($9.95/month) version of the product. The company raised $3 million from Ignition Partners, Second Avenue Partners and Cedar Grove Investments in October 2005. → Read More
Web based voice mail management system GotVoice announced today morning that it closed a first round of funding with $3 million from Ignition Partners, Second Avenue Partners and Cedar Grove Investments. One representative from each fund will join the GotVoice board. GotVoice converts your voice mail to MP3 format and sends it to you via email. The company is working on a beta feature that will alow users to compose voice mail messages through the browser and deliver them to a list of recipients simultaneously. Michael Arrington reviewed GotVoice in June. He gave it a generally mixed review but said that he really liked the conversion to MP3 format. I’ve tried the service myself and had the dreadful misfortune of owning one of very few phones the company says do not work well with the system. I don’t feel a strong need for this function in the first place. Chris Pirillo loves GotVoice and interviewed the company’s CEO in January. We wrote about another web management tool for telephony called GrandCentral in our coverage of DEMO. That service offers far more functionality in a complex leverage of VOIP, but if simplicity is what you seek then GotVoice might work well for you. Other companies funded by Ignition Partners include Jobster, Judy’s Book and Melodio. Second Avenue Partners has invested in NewsVine, among other companies. → Read More
It doesn’t have a fancy design or well throught through navigation. I can’t find a single use of Ajax or javascript on the site (although there is some use of Flash). And that’s ok, because GotVoice does something I love – it converts voicemails from my home and cell phone into MP3s and sends them to me by email. This is something I’ve gotten quite used to with Vonage (voicemails are sent as MP3s to my email), but I don’t have the same option from my cell phone carrier. GotVoice solved the problem for me. Setup took a few minutes (you have to give GotVoice your voicemail credentials) and then it just worked. Voicemails are now sent to my inbox as MP3 files (and saved in my voicemail system). The basic GotVoice service is free, and they announced two premium services last week. The Plus service, which is $5 per month, allows more scheduled voicemail checks per day. The Premium service, which is $10 per month, has yet more checks, and also provides you with a RSS feed with voicemails included as enclosures. While I love the idea of having a RSS feed for the voicemails, it doesn’t justify paying $10 per month. The basic free service is more than adequate for me. If you want your voicemail in the same inbox with your email, GotVoice is an excellent choice. This isn’t as fancy as Spinvox, which converts voicemails to text, but it does save me the hassle of checking voicemail multiple times per day. Note that it only works in the U.S. Note: There are a number of unanswered questions about the service which are either not discussed on the site or have conflicting FAQs. The comments below go into this somewhat. I’ll post clarifications once I hear from the company. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
