You’re away from your desk, maybe in the car, and a thought strikes you. It might be a memo to do something, or it might be the ultimate solution to the problem of dark matter. Either way, how do you make a note of it? Other drivers would be alarmed if you took your hands off the wheel to dig out your notebook, but you don’t have to. You simply use your phone (hands free unless you’ve stopped) to call Jott, then dictate a message. In a short time a transciption of that message is being sent to whomever you want, including yourself, by e-mail. Wade Rousch reports that it works, and that it’s free. If it rolls out successfully, there might be a premium service with add-ons that some might find worth paying for, but the basic Jott service is free. It’s a simple idea.

Even the speech-to-text process at Jott is low-tech. Jott’s phone system makes sense of contact names such as “myself” using speech recognition software, but such software is still far too primitive to deal with the unrestricted vocabulary that callers use in their actual messages, not to mention rushed or garbled speech or audio junk such as ums and uhs. So Jott saves messages as sound clips on central servers. Human workers at a large call center in India log onto the servers, listen to the most recent clips, and transcribe them manually. In case a transcription is murky, every e-mail from Jott also contains a link to the original sound clip.

This is another innovative service that’s sadly only currently available in the U.S. (although they say they’re working on providing international support). I like the fact that this service combines converging mobile and Internet technologies with something made possible only by globalization - an Indian call centre that handles the “low-tech” manual transcribing process. As present 100 percent of calls go via a human being, but that might change as software gets better. This is a great idea. Remind me to send myself an e-mail about it.

From Adam Smith Institute

Tags: Libertarian, Politics, Liberty, Freedom