Out-of-the-Box Lawyering

Jott — A great way to send an e-mail just by dictating it

Jott is a wonderful free service that lets you send an email by dictating it as a voice message. You can even use a plain old cell phone that doesn’t have regular Internet capability.

You sign up with Jott and then, on your computer, enter the names and email addresses of those to whom you might want to send messages. You can even enter several names as a group, which will allow you to send the same message to all who are in the group. And you only have to dictate the message one time. (You can also send email messages to yourself.)

You can dictate up to 30 seconds on one message. The recipient will, within minutes, receive an email with your message, together with a voice backup that goes with the printed message. That voice backup could be important because, like all voice recognition software, the transcription is not always perfect. For instance, I dictated "either call me or e-mail me" and it was transcribed "neither call me or e-mail me." However, the correct version was clear from the context and the voice backup file was available if the reader knew there was an error.

You can also use Jott to send yourself a reminder at some time in the future. Jott, in a near-Valentine’s Day email, details this interesting capability:

“Jott can help you to remember to buy chocolates and flowers, or call the people you love. When you call Jott, just say ‘Reminder’, choose a time and set the date to February 14th, then leave yourself a message to remember to call that special someone. Your reminder will be delivered as an email and text message on Valentine's Day. It's that easy.” (You could, of course, set the reminder for February 10 to give yourself additional time to buy those presents.)

Jott has five YouTube video demos that show you how the messaging and the reminders work. I think the video Jott Hooks You Up has the best descriptions.

Tom Mighell had a posting about Jott with additional details. (Tom publishes an excellent free email called Internet Legal Research Weekly. You can see it at his site and you can sign up there.

For still more information, you can go to MIT’s Technology Review.

NOTE: I would appreciate learning of ways that lawyers and support personnel have used Jott. I'm not allowing comments to be posted because of severe comment spam problems. However, you can send me your thoughts at the following email adress:

Type "noboxes" before the @ sign and type "cox.net" after the @ sign. (Do not include the quotation marks.)

Thanks for your thoughts.