Jott was a very cool web application that converted your voice recordings into text and forwarded them to wherever... for free. Then the company decided it wanted to make money. How did Jott change the landscape of texting as a social interaction tool, and did their curtailing of their free service change it back again?

Celia and I conducted a deep scientific study on the subject of text message interaction, and we concluded (scientifically) that the ideal process for text message interaction would be one where the sender initiates the communication by talking, by saying the message out loud, and where the recipient gets to read it. Further expounding on this thesis follows. (Hear me out.)

Why Texting?

First, let's explain the allure of texting. People of somewhat older generations (e.g., mine) seem not to see the point of it. "Why not just call the other person?" they ask, "It's gonna be cheaper than paying 10 cents just to say OK to someone." (They don't know that you're supposed to just say "K", but that's just a vocabulary issue.)

I was such a person for a long time, but I've since seen the light. There are lots of times when voice-calling a person is not practical. Sometimes you just can't talk, because it's noisy wherever you are, or because you can't be noisy there. Sometimes the other person isn't in a position to listen, because it's noisy where they are, or because they can't be distracted by the act of picking up their phone and answering a call from you.

Why Voicemail Doesn't Help

Voicemail really isn't a solution to this problem, because voicemail suffers from the same malady that a live interpersonal conversation suffers from: it's serial, it happens over the course of time—sometimes more time than you're really willing to devote to either sending or receiving a message. The protocol of leaving a voicemail requires that the sender first find your number and call it, identify themselves aurally at the voicemail prompt (which only follows after your involved but very witty outgoing message), offer greetings and salutations, and then state their purpose in calling, followed by info on how they can be contacted to respond to them. "Hi, this is Sal. How ya doin'? Listen, I was calling about that thing we were supposed to do next week? Was it Satur... Hey, watch it, moron! ... Sorry, that wasn't directed at you, there was someone on the road ahead driving like a jerk. Anyway, the shflkbjvnxfjhtjsh fjhgjhtjcjvhb ... is right after the shdkjfihix xkjkskewgbfuius ... so if you ... listen, my connection is dropping, so if..."

The protocol for listening to voicemail requires that the recipient connect to their voicemail service, enter a password, and walk through the act of listening to messages one after another. All of this is far from ideal and detracts from the immediacy we originally expected from a direct conversation. (Which, let's face it, we often circumvent by letting calls go to voicemail, because the serial nature of a direct conversation makes it just as time-consuming, and we're all about deferring time-consuming tasks like actually interacting with other human beings, right?)

Texting Protocols

The protocols for texting are leaner and terser. Assuming you and the sender know each other, the sender picks out your phone number from their address book, chooses to send a text to that number, and starts typing. No waiting for you to answer (or not to answer), no sitting through your clever outgoing message, no need to identify themselves verbally because the text message envelope tells you precisely who they are upfront. There is no longer any need for those awful time-consuming social lubrications like "Hi" and "This is your mother." On the receiving end, you get a text, you see immediately who it's from, you examine and respond to it (or ignore and trash it) at your discretion. Done. There's no "getting" a text the way you have to take explicit action to "get" voicemail.

Although there is a terseness associated with sending a text message, there are hidden costs. Despite the economies of abbreviation afforded by textspeak, it's tedious having to type using a 3x4 standard phone keypad, and most people don't have phones with the QWERTY keyboards that would make typing text messages a bit easier. Compound this with the fact that, even on full-size computer keyboards, few people are speed-typist certified and you see the speed bump in the road for most people. (Although I'm sure there are some with mad keypad skills who blaze past QWERTY typers.) Being able to say your message using your voice, and having it translated automatically into digital text and forwarded to your intended recipient for them to read, that would be ideal. Reading a text is (assuming the sender isn't as verbose as, say, me...) a one-shot deal: you read it and take it in all at once. Contrast that to the serial act of listening to a voice message. (Now you see where we're going with this.)

Voice In, Text Out (VITO?)

This is where Jott came into the picture. Jott's online service is best known for its ability to let you record voice notes, have them translated into text, and then save them or forward them. Meaning that you could set up a Jott contact with an email address corresponding to a cellphone number (e.g., 9175551234@txt.att.net), record a Jott voice note (either by calling Jott's toll-free number or by using Jott's iPhone app) and tell Jott to send the translated text to that contact (i.e., to their cellphone as a text message).

This was all well and good, and quite useful, until Jott's beta period ended last month. This meant Jott was no longer free, and aside from limited usage of the service, you couldn't do things like forward translated texts to friends as text messages unless you had a paid monthly plan. And with a monthly cellphone bill pushing three digits, adding even a relatively small $4/month charge really isn't on my radar.

Now, I only learned about Jott and its capabilities... a couple of days before the beta ended (yes, my timing is awesome!) so I didn't become dependent on it. Those that did may be more willing to fork over the $4. But there are still alternatives to Jott (like EverNote and reQall, both of which provide iPhone apps as adjuncts to their services) that may not have exactly the same capabilities but still offer a variety of options. And we can always hope that Jott may restructure their available options, and maybe allow some of their forwarding functionality on a limited basis with a free account. The ideal instant communication mechanism is still out of reach... for the moment.