The Contented Cow Blog

Building Workplaces That Work

Okay, what you usually find on this page is a post relating to Richard’s most recent vacation, a rant from yours truly on a current source of irritation, or an opinion or tidbit pertaining to leadership, employee relations, or organizational performance. And that will be a consistent theme for this blog, because Richard takes a lot of vacations, I spend enough time pissed off to be affectionately known as ‘Grumpy’ by my granddaughter, and we earn our livings dealing with leadership and workforce issues.

Today, however is different. Chalk it up to about a week of 100+ degree heat in the Memphis area, where I live. The weather has taken the starch out of everyone’s sheets, so today is going to be “blog lite”, if you will, but you’re going to be the beneficiary. I’ve got a little tip to share with you. Let’s get to it.

For about two months, I have used a new, free (repeat, free) service called Jott. Jott is a relatively new personal communications and organizing tool that, using some slick voice recognition technology, enables you to send individual and group emails via your cell phone. In other words, if you are traveling or just out of the office, you can use your phone’s voice function to deliver both voice and email messages to a friend, staff member, or the entire team, all in one fell swoop. You can also use it to send short reminder messages to yourself. It’s as simple as calling Jott’s toll free number (on speed dial, of course), speaking the name of your contact, speaking your message, and hanging up. That’s it. No taking your hands off the steering wheel to text or type an email with your thumbs, or any of that stuff. Just enter your contacts into Jott’s online directory, and you’re set to go.

I’ve used it to quickly and effortlessly interrupt Richard’s vacation, advise business associates of last minute meeting changes, and respond to clients while on the road. Speak at a reasonable pace, enunciate your words properly, and you’ll be pleasantly amazed by the result. Jott even negotiates “Southern” with aplomb.

Headquartered in Seattle, Jott was founded in 2006 by a couple of Microsoft alums. According to John Pollard, Jott co-founder and chief executive, “we are solving a problem of, when away from your PC, how to communicate multimodally in text, hands-free.”

If you ask me, Jott is a really neat tool, and next to Skype and Vonage, is one of the hottest, most useful things to come out of the voice market since Alexander Graham Bell. Give it a try.

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