When Seattle-based voice to text service Jott first went live in December 2006 I wrote: “It’s very simple – a user calls a specific phone number and leaves a voice message along with a recipient or recipients (an obvious use for Jott will be for people to leave themselves quick notes). The voice message will then be converted from voice into text and delivered via email or SMS. The recipient or recipients can choose between reading the text or listening to the original voice message.”

Things haven’t gotten a whole lot more complicated at Jott over the last two years. They haven’t raised much capital by recent standards – compare their $5.4 million in venture capital to competitor Spinvox’s $200 million. But the company has 420,000 (presumably) happy customers who primarily use it for one of three things: mobile productivity, hands-free communication and web services (voice I/O). People use it to send voice-to-text emails and sms messages, send Twitter messages, add calendar items, etc.

To date the company, led by ex-Microsofter John Pollard, has spent exactly nothing on marketing. Yesterday they left beta and released a free service called Jott Basic (beta users are now on that service, and the iPhone app remains free). Premium plans start at $4/month. Most people will be fine with the basic plan.

The company also released Jott For Outlook (this is really cool) and Jott Express, an Adobe AIR desktop application.

More details on the Jott blog.

It’s not official quite yet, but the iPhone App Store is live and you can download version 2.0 of the iPhone software – which is all you need to run the 552 applications currently available.

We’ve been gathering videos and overviews of many of the applications and have held them until now. We received demo vidoes for dozens of applications, ranging from basic games to complex GPS-enabled social networking applications. Below are some of our favorites.

Among the apps that we didn’t include below (primarily because of their simplicity) are Recorder (a voice recorder), Movies (movie showtimes), and iMaze (a basic maze game).

Social Networking On The iPhone:

The iPhone, with cult-like users and location aware technology, is the perfect social networking device. Earlier this year we speculated that someone would emerge with a killer social networking app for the iPhone. It turns out that there are lots of contenders.

Loopt

Loopt – We’ve been tracking Loopt’s efforts around their iPhone application for months now. In April we posted early screen shots of the app without saying who had built it. Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference. We’re big fans of Loopt, and will have more news on them later today. For now, download the free application here.

Limbo

Limbo – Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.

On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt. You can download the app here for free.

Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.

When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program.

But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally – let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message – “Just left you a VM, it’s important” – just so you know it’s there.

There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.

The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jott, for example).

More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).

For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying.

Twitter is certainly usable via SMS on a mobile device, but typing messages on a phone is cumbersome. A service that converts voice to text and then posts it to Twitter could be a niche hit.

A number of services have launched to allow users to record messages and link to the recording from Twitter (see Twitsay, Twittergram). And services like Jott and Spinvox are providing tools that allow voice to text conversion for Twitter, Facebook, Pownce and other social networks. But nothing I’ve seen so far is as simple to use as TwitterFone, a new service by serial Irish entrepreneur Pat Phelan.

The service launched moments ago into private beta. To use it you need to verify your phone number and Twitter account, and TwitterFone will then give you a local phone number to call to leave messages (they support the U.S., UK and Ireland now, adding more). Then, any message you send will be transcribed, and posted to Twitter along with a link to the recording (here’s a test message I left). If the message is longer than 140 characters, just the first part is transcribed, but the entire recording is still available. There is a time limit of 15 seconds on the recording.

The service is partially automated via voice recognition software, and flagged words go to a human for translation. For now the service supports English only; Japanese support is promised in 8 weeks or so.

One problem/slightly humorous aspect of the service is that there is no going back once you start recording. In this test message I started coughing and just hung up. The coughing was dutifully transcribed and posted. A simple option at the end of a call to delete the message is needed.

The service is free for now, they may add premium features over time. We have a handful of beta accounts to give out now. Tell us why you think you need it in the comments below – the most compelling get an account.

When I first reviewed GotVoice in June 2005, I thought it was an awesome, if rough-around-the-edges, application. Gotvoice’s goal is to bring sanity to your voicemail inbox, and it does that well. Tonight they are relaunching with a much cooler interface and a whole bunch of new functionality.

Previously GotVoice was a simple service that used your voicemail credentials and turned each voicemail into a MP3 file. Got Voice would then send out an email with a link to your GotVoice inbox. It basically allowed users to move voicemail administration from their phone to their computer.

The new features take that basic service several steps forward. First, two phones can now be associated with an account. Also, you can now compose voicemails via a flash recorder in the service (or via your phone), and deliver it to the voicemail of people in your contact list. This is great for responding to messages, or to broadcast a new message to one or more people.

Another useful feature of Gotvoice – since it has access to your phone admin via your credentials, you can also use it to change your voicemail greeting. They’ve created a tool that mixes your voice with any MP3 you care to upload. Once you’ve created the greeting, GotVoice will turn it into your voicemail greeting.

Finally, the coolest new feature. GotVoice will be launching a stripped down WAP version of the voicemail inbox page for access from a mobile browser. The result is a visual voicemail product that is sure to be the rage as soon as the iPhone launches with it’s own visual voicemail. This page can be accessed from the browser, and GotVoice is working to do deals with carriers in the U.S. to offer this directly as well.

What GotVoice isn’t doing yet is converting voicemails to text, something that they say they’re working on via a partnership. Jott and Spinvox do this now, and it is a bit of a hole in GotVoice’s offering. I look forward to the feature being added soon.

GotVoice has a free and premium ($9.95/month) version of the product. The company raised $3 million from Ignition Partners, Second Avenue Partners and Cedar Grove Investments in October 2005.

Seattle based Jott will launch its new voice to text product sometime this week. It’s very simple – a user calls a specific phone number and leaves a voice message along with a recipient or recipients (an obvious use for Jott will be for people to leave themselves quick notes). The voice message will then be converted from voice into text and delivered via email or SMS. The recipient or recipients can choose between reading the text or listening to the original voice message.

Like many new Seattle startups, Seattle PI reporter John Cook got an early look at them and was able to test out their software. While the voice recognition isn’t perfect, it seems good enough. His message of “Jott Networks is a new startup that converts your voice into text and delivers it via e-mail” was translated into “Jott now works as a new startup that converts your voice and ___ delivers it via E-mail.”

Jot is currently a four person team that includes two former Microsoft employees – John Pollard and Shreedhar Madhavapeddi. The company has raised less than $1 million in capital, from Ackerley Partners, Draper Richards and Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom.

Jott looks to be big competition for high flying startup Pinger, which just completed an $8 million round of funding from Kleiner Perkins and DAG Ventures. The Pinger team says that they are seeing significant usage growth, but they do not convert voice into text – recipients must listen to the original voice message. See a Pinger demo here.

Conversion to text is a big advantage that Jott has over Pinger. Chances are Pinger is hard at work to add this feature, too. In the meantime, I anticipate that I will often use Jott to send myself and others messages, particularly when traveling.

Note also competitor Spinvox, which is currently only available in the UK.