Jott to Drop All Free Services, Launches Voicemail Transcription Today
Bad news/Good news from Jott: The voice-to-text service (one of David Allen's favorites, we just learned) will drop all free services on Feb. 2. Today, however, they're launching a new voicemail transcription service.
Jott had already scaled back its free offerings when it jumped out of beta in August 2008. Jott's CEO John Pollard told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington that the downward spiral of advertising markets led to the decision to drop even limited free services. That means everyone, including users of Jott's free iPhone app, will require a minimum $4/month plan to continue using Jott's transcriptions to email, SMS, webapps and task management tools.
One thing Jott is offering free is a week's trial of its new voicemail transcription service, which is $9.95 per month for 40 transcribed messages after that. Like competitors YouMail, CallWave and MessageSling, Jott can text or email you when a message arrives you didn't pick up on, or let you visually manage them at its website. One unique feature seems to be a link in the email message to set a call-back reminder, so voicemail alerts don't end up lost in the shuffle of all your other messages.
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