Turning Your Voice into Emails, Text Messages, and Reminders

Comic books used to have the best advertisements in them.  If you read the ads as an adult, you'll find loads of humor.  As a child however, comic book ads held the promise of magical and mystical toys that would change your life forever.  For less than $20 of your parent's money, you could choose from a treasure trove of oddities including hand-buzzers, sea monkeys, hypnosis kits, palm reading kits, x-ray vision goggles and more.    One of the most intriguing for me was the "Learn to throw your voice" kit.  If you believe what the ad said, you could learn to throw your voice so that the other people in the room would swear it was coming from somewhere else.  Imagine the power; casting a "Let me OUT!" from the refrigerator.  Or "It's hot in here" from the fireplace on Christmas Eve…

 

Well, we're in the 21^st century now and with the internet, you can throw your voice practically anywhere.  The folks at Jott.com have contrived a way to make this a useful thing.  Imagine that you've traveled to a new city and you're in the middle of a long marketing meeting when some pinhead suggests that you all should, "take this meeting offline to develop some core competency around a new paradigm" (I hate marketing meetings).  What this means to you is that you're going to have to reschedule your flight out of there… probably an earlier flight!  You don’t have time to re-book it right now, and you don't have a fabulous secretary in tow that could do that for you, so what do you do?  Make a note to do it later?  Email yourself?  CALL yourself?

 

Call Jott!

 

Jott is a free service on the internet that will let you call and leave a voicemail message, and then it will convert that voicemail to a text message, reminder, or appointment.  You can send the message anywhere you like, even if you need to send it to yourself! 

 

My sister found this little jewel and while I love my sister to death, she's been known to dig up websites that are cute and fun, but rarely useful or practical.  So, I was a bit nervous when I set up my free Jott account.  I tried it, and guess what?  Not only did it work flawlessly, but it was very easy and the overhead is almost non-existent.  I called their toll free number from my cell.  Jott answered and the conversation went like this:

 

JOTT:  "Who would you like to Jott?"

ME:  "Myself"

JOTT:  "Speak your message clearly."

ME:  "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

JOTT:  "Got it!"

 

At this point, you can hang up and Jott will send you the text back in an email and a text message but you hold on, you can schedule the reminder:

 

JOTT:  "Would you like to schedule this reminder?"

ME:  "Yes"

JOTT:  "What Day?"

ME:  "Friday"

JOTT:  "What time?"

ME:  "9am"

JOTT:  "This reminder will be sent to you on Friday, March 7^th at 9am, got it."

 

It worked like a charm!  Now, I know most business travelers have a blackberry or a smart phone that handles the scheduling, etc, for them.  If you're like me though, you may not have enough time at that very moment to open your calendar, create a new event, enter all the little dates and times, etc, and type in your message.  This is a nice way to leave yourself a note, no matter how long or short; trivial or important.  Give it a try!