Speech to text: Jott

A few weeks ago I blogged about the Spinvox demo that transcribes a short message and texts it to your cell phone. Then someone pointed me to Jott, which transcribes your message and sends it in email to someone in your phone book. I'm impressed. Voice transcription has come a long way since I started playing with IBMs Via Voice years ago. The old transcription systems were speaker dependent, and required a high quality microphone and a lot of training for the performance to be very good. Spinvox and Jott are doing speaker independent transcription, and from callers on cell phones as well. There are a lot of potential applications out there, just waiting for someone to develop them.