Jott banking on speech-to-text service

Some of the world’s biggest corporations want to turn your phone into a portable, multimedia entertainment system. But John Pollard just wants to make your phone a digital Post-It note.
Pollard, along with fellow former Microsoft Corp. executive Shreedhar Madhavapeddi, last year co-founded Jott Networks Inc., a Seattle-based messaging company. Jott users dial a toll-free number from a mobile phone and leave a voice message up to 15 seconds long that is then transcribed and delivered to a computer or cellphone via text message or e-mail.
The service, which is free and in public testing, is targeted at everyone from on-the-go businessmen who want to send themselves reminders to soccer moms looking to create a shopping list on the way to the grocery store.
The offering also includes a “JottCast” feature-a “one-to-many” service that allows users to create groups of friends and colleagues and send a single message to each member.
Pollard claims Jott users number “in the thousands” despite the fact that the company has yet to market the service. Some of the more popular users, he said, are bloggers who set their blog page as a contact and Jott blog postings over the phone.
“We’ve kept the technological hurdle very low. You don’t need a new phone, you don’t need to download,” he explained. “We’re three months into this and we’re beating all of our business-model estimates” despite the fact that the company has yet to spend any marketing dollars.
Jott’s service builds on “send-to-phone” features that are quickly becoming popular on some Internet sites. Yahoo Inc., for instance, allows users to send driving directions to their handsets, while Epicurious.com-the site for Bon Appetit and other foodie mags-delivers recipes to mobile phones. And Jott is reminiscent of HeyAnita Inc., a now-defunct voice-to-text firm that allowed users to send text messages instead of leaving voicemails.
Interestingly, Jott chose to forgo voice-recognition software, which offered limited vocabularies and sometimes failed to deliver accurate messages. Instead, staffers at a call center in India transcribe every message manually.
“What we’ve always said is that it’s more important to provide something that works for people,” Pollard said. “As time goes on, as the processing power gets better, we will increase the amount of automatic speech recognition that happens. But for the time being, our system works great.”
The startup launched with less than $1 million from Ackerley Partners, Draper Richards and Atomico Investments. Pollard said he hopes to continue to offer a free, basic service for low-end users while charging a premium for more active Jott users and more sophisticated services. Meanwhile, he said, the company will continue to raise funds as it expands.
“What we’ve decided to do is take a little bit of money now, get out there and find out what people want,” Pollard said.
“We have a very good idea that there is a group of people who will pay us for this.”