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.

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.

Voice-to-text technology is finally getting some respect. As first reported by TechCrunch UK, Goldman Sachs is investing in a $100 million private financing round for SpinVox, a London-based technology startup that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated. Other investors in the round included GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. This brings the total invested so far to $200 million, reports Reuters. The 31-year-old CEO, Christina Domecq (a member of the liquor family of the same name) says this latest round values the company at $500 million. There were rumors previously that SpinVox was pursuing an IPO, but with the markets in a tizzy the company found more private money instead.

SpinVox has some interesting Web apps, including Spin-My-Blog and Facebook and Twitter integration, but it is really a mobile play. People actually pay extra for this type of service on mobile phones. SpinVox has partnerships with twelve mobile carriers, mostly in Europe, including O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3, and Virgin Mobile. They still have limited availability in the U.S. for any of their services. But if people like visual voicemail on the iPhone—which simply lists voicemails like e-mails but still makes you listen to them—imagine if they could translate all of those voicemails to e-mail and simply read them.

When it comes to mobile, voice is still the best way to input information but it is not the best way to extract it. SpinVox lets you have the best of both worlds. This voice thing is gonna be big.

I am convinced that we are going to see a big growth in voice apps that use a mobile phone as a microphone. Today, at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, London-based startup SpinVox announced a new feature of its speech-to-text service that lets users call in their Twitters or send in messages to Facebook or Jaiku.

Is making a phone call easier than thumbing an SMS? Depends what kind of phone you have and what kind of person you are. But the Dictaphone is now social. This will appeal at least to all those people who like to record their notes into a mini tape recorder. They can share those thoughts with the world, and computers will transcribe them.

As far as I can see from a quick perusal of SpinVox’s Website, its service is only available in Europe, and it is not free. But it is an obvious solution to the mobile user-interface problem. The best input technology for a mobile phone is speaking into it. Maybe competitors SimulScribe, Jott, or Yap will step up to the plate in the U.S.

Wait, there is already a way to turn a phone into a microphone for any Web application. It is called the MyVox API from VoodoVox. It is ad-supported so it is free. And the best app built on the API can win $25,000.

Hat tip to our man in Spain, Crunchgear’s John Biggs, who alerted me to the SpinVox announcement, and discovered these weird blockhead dolls at its booth at MWS:

GotVoice is a great voicemail utility that has so far focused on delivering visual voicemail (phone/web), custom voicemail greetings, and broadcasting voice messages (like Pinger). Through some clever coding, GotVoice links directly into your voicemail to pull messages into the system and send messages back out through it. However, the product has been lacking one of the killer voicemail features of their competitors, speech-to-text.

Today they’re differentiating themselves from GrandCentral and closing the gap with their other competitors by adding speech-to-text transcription. And adding avatars to boot.

Their new avatar system will let you add some personality to your voicemail playback using SitePal’s avatars. It’s sure to come in handy if for some reason you enjoy getting your messages delivered by a bear.

Their speech-to-text offering allows you to transcribe voicemails to text for delivery via email or SMS. You can transcribe all your messages, or filter by contact. Transcription is available on their $9.99/month premium accounts including 40 messages a month with additional charges for each message thereafter, although they have a 14 free trial.

Spinvox and CallWave also offer call transcription. Spinvox is pricey in the U.S. if you take into account exchange rates, costing £9.99/month for 50 messages. CallWave is currently a good deal, transcribing calls for free during their open beta.

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.

London-based Spinvox is a voice to text service that we wrote about last May (see MobileCrunch coverage as well). The key product takes voicemails, converts them to text and sends them via email and/or SMS to you to read. At the time they were only available outside of the U.S. Now, they are starting to take U.S. customers.

Spinvox mainly distributes their product through cell phone carriers, although they will set up customers directly as well. Pricing will be determined by carriers, but UK pricing is here, and it isn’t cheap.

I have been lucky enough to be using Spinvox to convert voicemails to SMS text messages since December, and it has been an incredible efficiency tool. If I miss a call while I’m in a meeting, I can see the SMS message a few seconds later and decide if I need to step out immediately and call the person back. In general, using Spinvox saves a ton of otherwise wasted time.

The company has set up a blog site to allow anyone to test the product – Go here, call the phone number on the site and leave a message. It will be converted to text and posted on the blog a few moments later.

Spinvox is currently negotiating carrier deals in the U.S., but has agreed to sign up 100 TechCrunch readers with free accounts, and there won’t be any charges for converted messages. If you live in the U.S. and would like to try Spinvox now, just leave a comment below and (this is important) leave your email address within the comment itself. Spinvox will contact you with the details.

See our coverage of Seattle based Jott, a company with similar technology but a slightly different product. SimulScribe is another company doing something similar to Spinvox, and charges $10/month for 40 voicemail conversions.

Spinvox has 150 employees and has raised a significant round of financing. The company says it should reach profitability by the end of 2007.

Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch writes about Spinvox, a UK based company that converts cell phone voicemails into text SMS or email messages (or both). Now this is something I would use.

This has been around for a while in the UK but is just rolling out in the US (it requires a deal with your cell phone carrier to work). No deals have been announced yet, but apparently in the UK people are using this like mad – and it isn’t cheap. See MobileCrunch for more.