In August voice-to-text service Jott moved out of beta and added a premium feature for $4/month. Since then, the company says, about 30% of Jott’s active users have opted for the premium, no-ads version of the service.
People use it to send voice-to-text emails and sms messages, send Twitter messages, add calendar items, etc. Voice messages are transcribed into text via software with humans to clean things up.
The free version of Jott is going to end on February 2, CEO John Pollard told me today. The terrible advertising market, he says, means every customer has to pay their own way from now on. Customers will need to pay $4/month to continue the service, the current price for a premium account. This includes users of the Jott iPhone application.
New Voicemail To Text Service
Jott is also preparing to roll out a new service, voicemail-to-text. Like competitors Spinvox, PhoneTag, GotVoice and others, voicemails will be converted into text messages and sent to you within a couple of minutes. The application is priced at the same level as competitors, $10/month for up to 40 messages. The product launches today.
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Clarification, you wrote, “Since then, the company says, about 30% of Jott’s active users have opted for the free, no-ads version of the service.”
Did you mean that 30% opted for the pay version, or that 30% are on the free version?
I guess either way that’s a pretty impressive free-to-pay ratio for a freemium application.
yep, thanks.
I’d be extremely surprised to find out they are doing voice-to-text without human intervention, which is in itself a mandatory-pay business model.
so would I, since they say they use humans.
Ah, “with humans.” The text flow got me.
So if history is any judge, expect them to start approaching the medical and legal markets.
Confronted with this broken promise, I will just stop using it.
Jott = Dead pool
Ahh… broken promises. They, as a company, should be required to offer their services for free. At least until they end up in the deadpool due to bankruptcy.
While I understand the difficulties Jott must be facing, moving into a me-too market like voicemail seems like an odd move. Why not leverage the technology they have into someplace less crowded, like telematics?
At any rate, voice to text is a tough market. Kudos to Jott for converting 30% of their free customers.
On behalf of the team, thanks for the kudos Grant. As for why we’ve moved into voicemail and why we’re not moving into other spaces, customers drive the vast majority of our development and they asked for us to do voicemail “like Jott should do voicemail”. They wanted call-back reminders, integration with their to-do lists, etc. and we think we’ve done a decent job of delivering that (but test it out for yourself and please give us your feedback).
Jott has explored other markets as well and will be making some announcements in the next few months. Stay tuned on that front…
“Confronted with this broken promise, I will just stop using it.”
Web apps cost money to create. Paying $4 a month for a service that makes your life easier is not as ridiculous as you make it out to be.
Ads only work on a huge scale (Google, TechCrunch, Facebook, etc). The rest of the world has to charge for their product or go under when the VCs figure that out.
No, Jott needs to build new B2B relationships to create revenue, not punish the users by charging for a once free service. If advertising isn’t working due to the economy, then they need to be creative and not lazy.
I realize short sighted, greedy investor types will not be able to process what Tim O’Reilly has written, but…
“Create more value than you capture…I want to remind you that financial success is not the only goal or the only measure of success. It’s easy to get caught up in the heady buzz of making money. You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself.”
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/.....s-fir.html
I agree 100%. A company does not need to be oportunistic and financially exploit every value they provide. “Leave some money on the table.”
We have been considering approaching Jott to establish a B2B relationship, but are still evaluating the pure-play B2B speech recognition companies.
$4 a month may be reasonable for someone who uses Jott to the maximum extent possible, but for anyone else it is WAY too much. If I had to pay $4 a month for every tiny little service that I occasionally use I’d probably out hundreds of dollars.
Every little bit certainly does count when you are talking monthly fees.
Why not at least offer a pay-per-message/text plan? I’d probably still use the service if I only had to pay 10 cents a message, although even that starts to leave a sour taste in my mouth especially for just text notes without transcription.
Looks like I’ll be looking for another note/to do list for my Iphone. Jott, I hardly knew ye.
Just wanted to say that the whiners bitching about broken promises made my morning…where did Jott promise that this service would always be free?
While these comments didn’t “make my morning”, I do think they are humorous. I believe people feel there is some tacit agreement that a free option will always be there. I imagine Jott will implement a “free trial” (if they haven’t already) in order to bring folks into their sales funnel. I think their pricing should be $50/yr or $15/quarter with refunds offered to 1st timers if within first 45 days.
They did actually promise that there would always be a free version. http://www.techtalkforfamilies.....of_jottcom
That said, companies have to make hard choices. I think I’ll just get myself a K7 number for personal use, since I only use it for preserving ideas when I don’t have my Palm handy, anyway.
I went and read that and it did say that the service was free, though that was last May and didn’t say that it would always be free. It just said that it was a free service and it was. Now it isn’t.
How web companies can make money {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/Fx8vWkKxHp_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”How web companies can make money ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/2veheFPgaM”}}}
I like Jott, but I mainly use it for capturing ideas when on long car trips. So I’m unlikely to sign up for a subscription service, but they might do well to consider a per transcription/multi-transcription pack purchase option.
That way they can make money off those of us who use their service once every 3-4 months, versus losing us completely. I wonder how many of us there are…
The pay_as_you_go model would be interesting too. Good point. What’s the price point? $10 minimum with $0.50/ transcription?
Nomiv and coldbrew, thanks for the feedback. We do have pay-as-you go plans for those people that don’t want subscriptions. The price point is $9.95 which gives you all Jott features and 60 seconds of recording time. There is no overage fee as you just pay for the minutes you use. Those have been popular plans for casual users of Jott or those who just want Jott around in case of an emergency (e.g. you want to contact your entire family and tell them you were in an accident).
I used the free service and found it handy, like sending notes to myself or others while out and about (while driving, I DID use a headset).
Tim O’Reilly was not saying “don’t charge for your product.” (I notice O’Reilly manuals are not yet free of charge.)
The question for the 30%, and anyone else, is whether the value you derive from the service is worth thirteen cents a day. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but that’s the basic proposition.
I think that $4 for the base service crosses a threshold that most non-business users are willing to pay. They are going to cut out a big chunk of users if that’s their base level. I love Jott but I don’t use the voice to text service often. I would rather see them charge more for voice to text and keep the list portion of it separate and more affordable. Remember The Milk offers list organization with web and iPhone access for half the price.
Why nobody talking http://www.dial2do.com? It has same or even better capabilities as Jott. Provides much better voice recognition (Jott always had issues with my accent). And most importangly it’s FREE.
Hi Mike
Happy New Year - and best wishes for 2009
I’ve been using Dial2Do.com for the last 6 months
Apart from the fact that its free, I actually prefer it to Jott [tried it out for a while as well] - dial2do is a simpler interface and I found the transcription quality better than Jott.
Best Regards
Fergus
Yup, dialtodo.com is an essential part of my toolkit too.
I use jott and have to say I like their service alot.
Frankly, I think this is a poor move. I think that outside of the valley, they will find it difficult, nigh, impossible to find subscribers. Realistically, Joe Schmoe Ohio is not interested in the free version of Jott, and there are a lot more Joe Schmoes than plugged in Techies. I think it would be better for them to revamp their advertising model, and try and find other ways of leveraging their user base to continue providing the service for free.
Thanks for your feedback, Shane. As an FYI, Jott’s customer base maps almost exactly to population density in the United States. We over-index by 1 or 2 percentage points in California, but that delta is spread pretty evenly across the rest of the states. It’s been amazing to watch. We’ve done very well everywhere in the US. For a visual clue about this, check out
http://jott.com/jotttv/
Yes, I use Dial2Do too.
One question you have to ask is how active those ‘active users’ are. Someone like me who uses the service maybe 4 times a month might not be willing to pony up for a monthly fee, as opposed to those who use it several times a day.
Read: “Not enough people are paying for our service. If this doesn’t change we’re DEAD!” Bye-bye Jott. (I pay for Evernote…they should buy Jott.)
I used the free version of Jott until they came out of beta. If Jott had been reasonably priced ($25.00 a year, in my estimation) I would have ponied up (I pay for many productivity software apps). Since then I switched to ReQall and have not looked back. WebIS is soon to add transcription service to their iphone app: Note2Self (”pricing yet to be determined”). Jott could have helped themselves by announcing a price drop in conjunction with their cancellation of the free service. This would create good will and help their somewhat tarnished public image.
Oh well, back to Skype Voicemail for taking voice notes I guess.
As someone who’s had Jott on my iPhone (and via web even before that) but who doesn’t use it that much, I immediately deleted Jott after I read this and started looking for a replacement. Tried Evernote, dial2do, etc - all very cool. The one I’m going with is called “ReQall” - a web app/iPhone app (free) combo. It’s got some pretty slick features like the ability to say “call bob on thursday at 5″ and it can recognize that that is a “to do” and that it is due this Thursday at 5pm. Nice.
Thanks TechCrunch for getting me started looking for something else - I found a cool app in the process!
I find this to be quite a relief. I can’t use Jott because the model makes no sense to me. You leave a message, then some person transcribes and sends it. Who are these people? Even it there’s only 1,000 users that’s a lot of transcribing, so a lot of employees. And the job seems so tedious. Jott clearly isn’t making ad money, so them charging $4 makes me feel a little. I still can’t use it, but now I can sleep at night.
4 letters
JOTT.
DEAD.
Coincidence, I think not!
Hm. I just stumbled upon this thread, have never used jott but am surprised how many people somehow found it useful as long as it was free and think different now that it is no longer so.
4$? Yes, I would think twice before paying that. But if the service is useful, then its the cost of a cup of coffee. 1 cup. For a month of service? Thats not *that* bad, is it?
Maybe I’m missing something.
Nobody seems to have anything to say about the fact that the Jott iPhone app has disappeared from the app store, and the page about the iPhone app has disappeared from Jott’s site. Given that the iPhone doesn’t have built-in voice dialing, and doesn’t support voice dialing through bluetooth, that makes Jott’s utility for me much much lower. And while an email to the company resulted in a promise that it would be coming back “real soon now,” the handling of the app doesn’t bode well for the company’s future.
Hi Liz,
We removed the app from the app store while we tested automated-only transcription with some users. These users received a message saying we were doing exactly that. A new application that works for paid Jott subscribers will be back available in the AppStore (pending Apple’s approval) in the next few weeks (certainly before the Feb. 2nd cutoff) and has a bunch of the additional features customers have asked us for. In the mean time, the iPhone app should work excellently for paid subscribers and will still have automated transcription for unpaid subscribers.
All the best,
Doug
Dear Doug,
February 2 is just two weeks away, and I am worried about losing my Jott for Iphone. It’s the only application I have strongly recommended to others (not just because it was free.) When is the paid version coming out on the Iphone store? I can’t find any information about it on the jott.com site. Will I be able to transfer my existing Jott files and notes and how much will it cost to buy and use per month?
Lastly, about three weeks ago, Jott said it was doing a test and the transcriptions wouldn’t work well during that time. Now I would say the transcriptions are working about 70 percent as well as they did before the test. Is it me or did something change?
http://www.antonybrydon.com
It seems less likely that the struggling ad market drove the decision, because the most that advertising could contribute per user per month is a fraction of a dollar. Hit a user once per day at a $10 CPM and you’re making only $0.30 per user per month. The ability to offset the human transcription costs with advertising seems challenging in good and bad ad markets alike.
Let’s suppose that the entire ad market evaporated and Jott lost all advertising revenue. Since roughly 30% of the base is paid, Jott could offset that loss by increasing the profit on an average paid subscriber by $1 per month. They could do this by introducing new features, introducing a new subscription level, or optimizing price for profit - and maintain a free service and a freemium model that seems to be working well.
Since they didn’t choose this path, and chose instead to sacrifice the freemium model, I suspect the costs of the free service are more significant than the reference to the ad model suggests and the profits on the paid service aren’t near what’s needed to offset the marketing expense. [Note: I've got zero insight into the actual economics of Jott's model - if my calculus is bad, I'd be grateful for a correction.]
It seems more likely that the struggling venture market and the difficulty of raising capital in this environment drove the decision. If the free service is bleeding cash and the margins on the paid service can’t fund the expense, the company is not running a self-sustaining freemium model and needs venture capital to fund the loss. At the same time, they are showing investors a model that loses more money as it scales. This is much less attractive than in 2005 and 2006, where growth metrics were more important to many venture investors.
I have been a light user of the free Jott Basic for a while now. The free plan was supposed to be supported by ads but I have never seen any ads on the Jott website nor heard any commercials before “jotting myself”. Does that mean that Jott received no ad revenues at all over the past 6+ months?
Anyway, for me, the service is not worth the $4/month and I may end up looking into ReQall or Dial2Do or simply rely on my brain.
Hm. I just stumbled upon this thread, have never used jott but am surprised how many people somehow found it useful as long as it was free and think different now that it is no longer so.
Let’s suppose that the entire ad market evaporated and Jott lost all advertising revenue.
Hey does anyone know who Jott is using to do their conversions? Do they partner with SpinVox or Got Voice or one of those?
Eventually , Google or one of their competitors will offer a similar service which will be advertising supported . They will wind up buying Jott or dial2do .
As mentioned a few times above, the two companies that should be pleased with the news are ReQall and DialToDo.
Both offer similar functionality to Jott and both are at the “proto-freemium” stage (i.e. free for now, we’ll introduce freemium later), so users unwilling to pay Jott should be heading their way. I hope they are ready!
Given that they too have to pay for transcribing (and lets assume that they won’t get much cheaper rates than Jott) and given that they don’t have big funding (that I know of) they too will be facing a “de-freemiuming” point when growing audience meets declining cash. (And yes, I just made up the word “de-freemiuming”.)
More here:
“Thoughts on Jott’s de-freemiuming”
http://www.shaiberger.com/?p=170
I use Reqall all the time. It’s still free. It transcribes a voice message and sends it to my email. It’s all I want.
Yes, I got an email notifying me about the change… it’s a great service in my opinion and well worth the buck. They would eventually need to do this.
Greg
It seems less likely that the struggling ad market drove the decision, because the most that advertising could contribute per user per month is a fraction of a dollar. Hit a user once per day at a $10 CPM and you’re making only $0.30 per user per month. The ability to offset the human transcription costs with advertising seems challenging in good and bad ad markets alike.
Another vote for Reqall, it’s great.
now theywant money! but i use them like every day! thats not fair!
I make jewelry and could use a service like yours. However, I prefer to use small children since their fingers are smaller. Is this a problem?