Blogging by voice part 2

March 03, 2008

Look, Ma, no hands!

My post yesterday was made while I was talking on my bluetooth headset while on a phone call to jott.com . I spoke to that web/phone service for about 30 seconds and hung up. Then, jott.com automagically transcribed my verbal words into plain text, and posted that text as a new blog entry here on the Digital blog! Amazing!! As you can see, it was pretty accurate in transcribing my words.

Jott can be used for many other things besides blogging. The website itself says you can write an email, send yourself a reminder, send a text message, send an email or text to someone else, all of it voice activated just by talking! For those of you with free nights & weekend minutes on your cell phone, try this out and add a comment for how you can use this. It's great for when you're not in front of a keyboard or on your smartphone, but want to get a message to someone, or remind yourself of something.

This whole episode reminded me of that Star Trek movie when Scotty held up a mouse and tried talking to it with voice commands. Well, now that time is here -- just around the corner! The accuracy of voice recognition continues to improve over time, and if Jott can transcribe voice into text, that text can be passed along to a computer as a command, and there you go!

Imagine: "Lights on" to turn on the lights (beats clapping), "open sesame" to open the closet door (when your hands are full), and "call home" -- actually, I can already do that via Voice Dialing.

(While Jott is building up its vocabulary and learning a wide range of voices and accents during beta version, it is a free service. I'd imagine the service will cost in the future, or be ad-supported. Jott was recently nominated as a WebWare 100 finalist, where the public can vote for their favorite Web 2.0 app.)

-- DJ Chuang, Director of Digital Initiatives & more, Leadership Network