Jott

» see jott.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard of jott was in retrospective posts about voice-to-text tools that predated google voice. it was a us-only service on a us toll-free number, which meant even if i had wanted to try it from ankara i would have been placing an international call to a number that would have rejected the incoming country code. voice-to-text as a consumer product barely existed in turkey in 2006 to 2011. what i knew about the space was mostly what dragon naturallyspeaking had done on the desktop side, and dragon was nuance's flagship, the same nuance that ended up owning jott.

john pollard and shreedhar madhavapeddi launched jott networks in april 2006 out of seattle. the mechanic was clean. you called 866-jott-123 and spoke for up to thirty seconds. jott routed the recording through a mix of computerized speech recognition and human transcribers, then delivered the resulting text back to you as an email or an sms. the whole thing sat in the space between voicemail transcription and a hands-free note-taking tool.

the pricing tiered up from free to premium. jott basic gave you a small monthly quota with ads on the delivery. jott at $4 a month removed the ads and lifted the quota, while jott pro at $13 a month added contact list integrations plus third-party posting. there was a separate $9.95 a month package that specifically covered voicemail transcription for up to forty voicemails per month. the series a from may 2007 brought $5.4 million into the company. by mid-2009 the product had a modest but loyal us user base of people who used it in the car and while walking.

nuance communications acquired jott on 14 july 2009 for an undisclosed sum. inside nuance the product ran for another twenty-two months before the april 2011 shutdown announcement went out. the final cutoff was 3 may 2011.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the phone call worked ~

the trick that made jott feel useful, rather than just a novelty around speech recognition, was the hybrid transcription pipeline. the automated speech recognition side handled the recordings where confidence was high. everything else got kicked to a human transcriber in near-real-time. the delivered transcript came back within a few minutes for most calls, sometimes faster if the recording was short and clear.

the ceiling on the mechanic was the toll-free-number requirement. that made jott a north american product by default. it also meant every session had a real per-call cost inside jott's operations, not just an api call to a hosted model. the human transcribers scaled linearly with usage. the unit economics of the consumer tier were always tight.

~ the nuance acqui-kill ~

nuance in 2009 was consolidating the voice-technology market fast. it had bought dragon systems years earlier, then vlingo and swype among a long list of others. jott fit as a mobile-side complement to the dragon dictation product line that nuance was pushing on iphone and blackberry. the acquisition closed on 14 july 2009. john pollard stayed on. the jott.com consumer site kept running through 2010.

the shutdown announcement came on 4 april 2011. nuance said the company was refocusing voice-to-text investments on carrier and enterprise distribution. the corporate translation was that the consumer subscription tier was not carrying its weight next to the enterprise deals nuance could close with mobile carriers and business software vendors. the whole consumer product line (jott.com, jott assistant, jott voicemail, jott for salesforce) went dark on 3 may. nuance advised users to download their stored messages before the deadline.

~ what survived ~

the jott team's actual technology carried on inside nuance's carrier products, the voice recognition pipeline that eventually helped power the early siri backend after apple licensed nuance for that. john pollard later co-founded a couple of other seattle-side startups while shreedhar madhavapeddi stayed in the ai and voice space. the consumer version of what jott did was absorbed by google voice's automated voicemail transcription and later by on-device transcription in whatsapp and telegram.

jott.com now returns nothing. the wayback machine holds the last version of the front page with its "call, jott, done" tagline and the small illustration of a phone and an envelope. the shape of the product, dial a number and get text back, is still a legitimate ux idea that no consumer service really carries today. we all just type into our phones now. jott sat in the middle window where voice input made sense but no one had a smartphone that could do it locally.

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