Nuance Shutters SpinVox Consumer Service

It's been just over 3 months since Nuance acquired SpinVox, saving the company from a death spiral. Since the acquisition a string of news stories have surfaced about the financial shenanigans that went on at SpinVox prior to Nuance's purchase. It's a shame that Spinvox fell to such lows. They had a great idea and were developing credible technological solutions.

A recent and not too surprising post on SpinVox's website indicates that they will discontinue their consumer offerings allowing them to focus on their carrier and network operator business.

A Twitter post from SpinVox stated: "We regret to inform you that SpinVox is no longer supporting individual user accounts. Your account will expire in 7 days. "

No word yet on what they intend to do with consumer customers of Jott, the Seattle based competitor of SpinVox that Nuance also purchased.

I Finally Got a Google Voice Invitation

I finally got an invitation to use the beta of Google Voice. It's all set up now and I've added a control to the right hand panel on this blog that allows you to call me with it. Just click on the control, it will prompt you for your phone number. Google Voice will then place a call to you at the number you specified and at the same time will call me and then bridge the two calls together.

I've configured my Google Voice account with all of my possible phone numbers: work, home, mobile and client work site. When it's trying to send me a call, it tries all of them simultaneously and then drops all the lines that I don't answer on. If I'm simply not available, it will route the inbound call to my Google Voice voice mail box. Once you've left your message, it will send me an email and an SMS message (to my mobile phone) with the transcription of your message. It will be interesting to see how Google's voice mail transcription compares to Jott and SpinVox. I'll keep you posted on that.

If you'd like my Google Voice direct phone number for your address book, it's (425) 502-5613.

Jott - The Ultimate Speech Self Service Application

While I'm a strong believer in using speech recognition, I'm not easily given over to hyperbole about speech applications. Frankly I find too few applications that wow me with their simplicty, their elegance or their usefulness. Even less frequently do I run across one that I find useful enough that I actually put the number in my cell phone's dialing directory (yes, it's speech enabled) and use often. That said, I've become addicited to Jott!

For those of you who haven't yet run across it, Jott is the brain child of a Seattle based company, Jott Networks that operates a voice to text service that makes staying organized and in touch easy. Simply put, Jott converts your voice into emails, text messages, reminders, lists and appointments.

After signing up for Jott's service at thier web site, you simply call the toll free number and your account is recognized from your caller ID information. The application asks you "Who you want to Jott", recognizes that request and then records your message. After recording your message, it is passed through a speech recognition process to convert it to text then sent on to the person, application or list you specified. It's an elegantly simple interface, that's intuitive and easy to use.

I use Jott to save reminder messages to myself, keep a record of business expenses and vehicle mileage throughout the day and add entries to my calendar without the need to pull out my laptop and find a WiFi connection. It's also great for sending "To Do" list items to my family members or co-workers. Direct application links are provided to dozens of tools like Google Calendar, Blogger, Twitter and many more so that your Jott's can be sent directly to them. They have a developer's site so that you can develope web service links to other applications that aren't already provided also.

I find it especially useful from my cell phone since it's user interface requires no use of hands, so with my headset I'm completely hands free for the entire transaction.

For you iPhone addicts, Jott has just added a mobile notepad that turns your voice into notes on your iPhone. It's available for download on Apple's App Store and their's a link to it on Jott's website at www.jott.com