I beta’d Jott, and it was cool. Then they went commercial and now charge $10/month for their voice transcription service. It’s cool and all, but not $10/month cool. Luckily around the same time Google Voice launched out of the GrandCentral acquisition, and now Google provides me with voicemail to text transcription free of charge (and even with better accuracy, imo).
Of course what’s cool about Jott that I missed was the ability to understand my voice and turn that into activities. I could send emails, post to blogs, update Twitter, etc. all simply by calling Jott and telling it what to do and what I wanted my message to be, and for the most part is would transcribe and email/post faithfully. Now I never became reliant upon Jott, so when they went commercial I did without it. However, I miss it.
I was discussing Google Voice and commercialization, and a friend (thanks Matz) recommend Dial2Do. I’ve just barely checked it out yet, but it’s more than an alternative, it’s a Jott killer.
Dial2Do does everything it’s pay service competitor does, and more, with a better and more intuitive clean interface. One thing that did always bugged me about Jott was that it kind of hard to navigate and find my stuff. Not very hard, but just non-obvious enough that it required effort. No one wants to spend effort checking messages (why my mobile voicemails tend to go unchecked for days at a time, because it’s a pain). Dial2Do alleviates this with a very simple uncluttered interface that gives me instant access to all my stuff.
Save for perhaps some expert features (Jott has launched new Voicemail and Salesforce paid services as well), Dial2Do does the same stuff, but with better transcription accuracy, and for friggin’ free. Yay and thank you Dial2Do!
A host of services are supported by Dial2Do. Twitter and calendar (Google Calendar integration!) are of course necessary and awesome, but Evernote was unexpected and welcome. Blogger, Kwiry, PingFm, PingMe, Remember The Milk, Tumblr, and Xpenser are all cool services to integrate with Dial2Do as well, and there’s many more. You can also listen to several sites’ rss feeds, including the beloved TechCrunch and Lifehacker.
I’m going to be trying to use Dial2Do often, and I think anyone interested in making their mobile more useful tool ought to give it a whirl too.
This is the standard Dial2Do screen. Every service I use is immediately available and all message counts clearly labeled.
The contacts screen is perfectly intuitive, as it should be.
A very clear enumeration of your added services, and exactly what to say to activate them. On Jott one just said the name of whatever service it was, but it often failed to understand and couldn’t differentiate between similar names.
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