A couple of weeks ago, I created a blog entry about Jott.com , a service that allows you to speak a message into your phone and have it automatically transcribed and emailed off to a predefined address.  My closing statement in that earlier entry was “I highly recommend this service to overly busy people everywhere”, or some such like that.

You see, I have been trying to get more efficient with my time lately and I have been known to read and write articles during the 35 minute drive home from my day job.  So you can imagine how thrilled I was about the idea of being able to speak my blog entries instead of trying to write while I drove … or even worse, using my blackberry while I drove - and my wife was even more thrilled, for safety reasons!  Well after two weeks of using Jott.com’s free service, I’d like to officially go back on my recommendation.

As with most any new technology these days, I figured that it would take me a little while to work out the kinks.  I imagined myself cruising down the highway, speaking my blog entries and they would be delivered automatically to my blog.  It was gonna be awesome!  But it wasn’t awesome at all.  I had expected it to make me more productive, when in fact it only made me better at figuring out what Jott.com thought I was saying.

As an example, I’ll share part of my first blog entry I tried to create on my way home from the my day in the rat-race.  It started out pretty well.  I dialed up the Jott.com hotline.  The phone rang and was greeted by a friendly “Who do you want to Jott”… so far so good.  I responded “blog”, which was a shortcut I had created in the Jott.com system, pointing to one of my email addresses that I set up to post directly to my blog (just another one of those nice features in WordPress).  This was all going very well I thought.

Then the Jott.com operator lady signaled me to start talking.  So I did.   I said something very important, and then I paused just for a moment (to make a right turn on red, I was of course driving).  And suddenly “beeep”… the Jott lady assumed I was done talking and was ready to whisk my message off to my blog.  I was almost home, so I decided that the quick sentence I had spoke would be good enough for the blog entry, and I could elaborate on it when I was logged back into WordPress again.  No worries (or hakuna matata, for my under 8 readers).

When I got online that evening, after all the kids were asleep, I decided to go do that “elaborating” I had planned on earlier.  So I logged into WordPress only to see “Would there be syke if the video sites had the ability” as my blog entry for the day.  WTF???  Was I drinking on the drive home too (not serious of course) ?  I racked my brain trying to figure out what I was saying, but I couldn’t crack the secret Jott code.   That blog entry was lost forever.

My two later attempts blogging and driving were also dismal failures.  And I found myself yelling into the phone, over enunciating my words, like I was talking to a deaf person.  And since I was afraid to lose an important point, I would keep repeating my sentences.   It went something like this:

“TODAYS BLOG ENTRY IS ABOUT MARKETING.  MARKETING IS WHAT I AM WRITING ABOUT.  THIS ENTRY IS ABOUT MARKETING.  OKAY.  HERE I GO.”

Then later, I had to read through this mess, and clean it up before it was published online.  Ugh.  Talk about a royal waste of time.  So I’ve given up using Jott.com to create my blog entries.  I still use Jott.com to send myself a quick email when I have an idea.  Or when I have something I need to add to my to-do list.

But I certainly mean it when I say that there would be syke if there was a service that could do this properly!

Tags: iKollect.com, Jott, productivity