Today’s Voice Enabled Productivity Offerings
Widgets & RSS FeedsSpeech enabled productivity applications are now available and affordable for mainstream business users with mobile phones. A major advantage of the current crop of tools is that they provide functionality that previously required entering data via text messages or a smartphone with a data plan. For example, it is possible to create calendar events via a phone call from a mobile phone that are then synchronized with a desktop application or a calendaring Web service.
Providers of speech enabled applications for mobile phones have access to an immense potential-market. According to the July 2008 report Critical Mass—The Worldwide State of the Mobile Web from Nielsen Mobile there are nearly 260 million U.S. mobile subscribers. This translates to a bit more than 85 percent of the U.S. population as a whole and is greater than the entire U.S. adult population. Slightly more than half of these subscribers use SMS, but only 15 percent use email, and only 17 percent use the Internet on their mobile device. Other global markets are substantially higher, for example according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Europe as a whole has above a 100 percent mobile phone penetration.
Overview of Voice Enabled Productivity Offerings
Three services have substantial offerings in this area—Jott, reQall and SpinVox. The three services have a fair degree of overlap, although they are not precisely comparable. Jott and reQall primarily focus on services that allow users to create personal information management data such as tasks, notes, and calendar items via voice to text. SpinVox is primarily focused on voicemail transcription although it supports PIM functionality as well. Voicemail service is clearly the easiest to monetize, as so many users are unhappy with the usability and accessibility of their voicemail systems. Jott and SpinVox also have options for sending messages via voice, as well posting to blogs and Twitter via voice. All services recognize the subscriber using caller ID, so each phone must be registered in advance and caller ID must not be blocked. Any type of phone may be used: mobile, landline, or VoIP, but the outbound number must be consistent, which could be a problem for some corporate PBX users that rotate through a pool of outbound numbers.
I first reviewed Jott in the On Message weblog in early 2007, although it has gained substantial functionality since then. Jott launched its public beta at the end of 2006 and was completely free until last month when the service was formally launched. Jott has built in support for notes/tasks, reminders, emails and text messages, each of which may be associated with a category. The service also has the ability to send emails or text messages using only voice commands. Jott has several mechanisms to import contacts from an address book or other online services. A user may also send messages to groups of contacts. Jott notes and reminders may be created via voice, text message or email from the user.
In some basic ways reQall and Jott are similar, however, reQall focuses on helping users store and recall information easily and providing reminders when you need them. The service supports notes, tasks, shopping lists and photographs intended as a memory aid. For example, a user could call reQall and record a list of tasks and due dates. Later that same day, the user could call reQall back requesting the service to read a list of tasks for that day. The photograph reminder function is still effectively a beta feature and requires that photos be retrieved from Google’s Picasa online service.
Synchronization with External Web Services
Jott is unique in that it also works as a front-end to a large number of popular Web services. You can connect Jott to Amazon, Google Calendar, Twitter, Backpack and others. While Google provides mobile Web and SMS interfaces to Google Calendar, Jott allows individuals to create appointments using only voice commands. As another example, you could call Jott while you were shopping, put in a request to Amazon via Jott about a product and Jott would then send you an email with the top five results from Amazon. Jott can be used to post to a number of popular weblog systems such as Wordpress, Movable Type, TypePad and Blogger using only voice commands. Jott is also capable of subscribing to RSS feeds and reading them back via text to speech, which leads to some very significant capabilities. It is possible to use Jott feed functionality, to listen to a summary of new messages in Gmail, to follow status updates on Facebook or Twitter, or to read headlines from a number of news sites and blogs. reQall also produces RSS feeds so services such as Google Calendar and Jaiku can also act on data created in reQall. SpinVox has the ability to post to a number of popular blog systems, social network services, and microblog services such as Twitter.
Synchronization with Mobile and Desktop Clients
Jott developed a number of applications to synchronize data from Jott to desktop and mobile devices. Jott has Outlook integration with support for both email and tasks within Outlook in addition to notes and calendaring. This means it is possible to add an item to your Outlook calendar or create an email draft with only a phone call. The Blackberry Jott application also supports integration with email, although you have to select the message on the Blackberry in order to respond to it with voice. Jott’s iPhone application allows users to record voice notes and automatically transfers them over the data network without using airtime. In addition the iPhone application allows users to manage notes and lists stored on Jott’s servers but not other features such as reminders, messaging, or links to other services. Jott Express is an Adobe Air-based desktop application that allows users to directly manage notes, lists and reminders that are automatically synchronized with the Jott services, as well as other Jott applications such as the iPhone. This array of applications contributes substantial functionality to Jott’s service although, I found myself wishing I could synchronize the address book data rather than just import. reQall has created applications for Windows desktop machines, Windows mobile devices, the iPhone, Blackberry, a plugin for Firefox and a Google Gadget. reQall’s iPhone application provides a full compliment of functionality with the exception of photographic reminders. In addition to the applications and voice commands users may interact with reQall via text messages, email, the Web, and instant messenger (AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk/Jabber). In addition, reQall provides RSS and a variety of popular calendar feeds as output.
I often find myself in situations where I am not near a computer and I do not want to stop what I am doing to peck out a note to myself on my mobile phone keypad. Jott, reQall and SpinVox all offer a way to simply call a number and leave a note to myself that will be transcribed and available next time I want to check my email, typically within five minutes or less. In all cases, the transcription quality is highly dependent on the audio quality of the call, so calls with high levels of ambient noise will result in less satisfactory results.
Jott is based in the United States. reQall’s parent company is India, although it has offices in the U.S. and Hong Kong. SpinVox is a U.K.-based company. When Jott was formally released, the service moved to tiered payment model with a free ad supported plan, a $4 USD monthly basic plan and a $13 USD month professional plan. Certain features such as messaging and connections to external productivity tools, the Blackberry application, and longer recording length are limited to the professional plan. The desktop tools plan is limited to the basic plan. All of reQall’s functionality is currently free, although they may charge in the future. SpinVox has a variety of pricing plans for its voicemail services, but all other portions of the service are currently free although some are limited to certain carriers and they may charge for these services in the future. The SpinVox voicemail service is handled by uReach in the U.S. and costs $10 USD a month for 40 voicemail message transcriptions.
Jott, reQall and SpinVox each have overlapping functionality, as well as unique features and different price points. Each of the services is simple to configure initially and is either free or low-cost to test. Jott has month-to-month and pay-as-you-go options. reQall is free. Many of SpinVox’s services are currently free including a free voicemail trial.
