Jott’s speech recognition
April 15, 2007I don’t push tech stuff too often, but I’m pretty freakin’ impressed [OK, less now; see below] with Jott, now in public beta. Call it on the phone, tell it who in your contacts you want to email, record the message, and it does a pretty shockingly good job with the speech-to-text conversion and sending out the (text) email. I’m going to have to tone down my ranting about how horrible no-training speech recognition is.
UPDATE: Soylent green is people! I mean, Jott is. Commenter Dave points me to the info that they’re using humans to do this. Well, no wonder it’s so good. Still a cool service, but (a) doesn’t make me alter my views on machine speech recognition, and (b) adds a little yuck factor to the equation, doesn’t it?
5 Responses to “Jott’s speech recognition”
It’s because they use real people in India to type them! Sounds like a joke, but it’s true - check out their website.
By Dave on Apr 15, 2007
Ha! You’re right! Thanks for pointing this out. I’d hate to have to moderate my rant about this. I’ll update the main post.
By ron on Apr 16, 2007
Ok, now it makes sense. For a minute there, I thought there was no longer an “invariance problem” for natural languages, and the site possessed some “magic algorithm.”
By Bob on Apr 16, 2007
Where on the site does it say this and how is it phrased?
I am also reluctant to give a website my cell# for fear of telemarketing lists (despite their saying they wouldn’t sell it w/o my permission, but then again I didn’t read the fine print of the agreement, so I may have given it). I don’t even know if this is a problem yet for cell owners, but in principle it bothers me.
And yeah, somehow “useful service” + “free” + “uses Indian people to listen to and then type in Americans’ self-obsessed notes” = wack business model.
By cm on Apr 17, 2007
I wouldn’t be too terrified about giving your number away to Jott. I’ve been a jotter for quite some time and no troulbes what so ever. And no….no telemarketers calling me haha. From my understanding, yes there are humans transcribing AND speech recogniztion software combined to give the best and accurate transcriptions. So I wouldn’t limit my thought of some guy and ONLY some guy listening to my jott. Anywho…. being in public beta for quite some time…I’d think the company would press on to a charged service. I’ve noticed that many businesses having integrated jott into their work flow….maybe Jott’s next step would be a business based model?
Anywho….. great to see jotters out there! have fun!
By Chris on May 2, 2007