Dear Jotters,

By now you probably know that we will no longer be offering the Jott service. We have included below the text of an email we sent to our active customers today.

We founded Jott in April of 2006. In the five years that have followed, we’ve been honored to serve you and work with outstanding people. We made great products.

As we said in the letter below, this is really just the beginning, and we are very much looking forward to having continued, positive impact on people, but just on a far larger stage.

Many thanks.

We are writing to give you advance notice that as of May 3rd, 2011, the Jott.com service will no longer be available. We know how much many of you have come to rely on the Jott service, so please know that this decision was not made lightly. Please be assured that we’ll work to help you through this transition. We truly appreciate your business and enthusiastic support over the years, and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In 2006 Jott emerged as a leader in mobile voice-to-text applications. Now, nearly two years after Jott’s acquisition and a successful integration into Nuance, we will officially end the Jott service. This may seem counter-intuitive – success leading to a shutdown. But while it is an ending of sorts, the reality is that the technology, service, talent and imagination of Jott will continue on as part of a far broader set of services. The Jott team, vision and technologies are an integral part of a global business which includes partners such as AT&T, Rogers, Bell Canada, Vodafone, Cisco, Vonage, and many others.

The dramatic expansion of Nuance’s voice-to-text services is clear evidence that consumers will respond to innovations that carriers offer, and with that in mind, we will focus our voice-to-text service investments on carrier and enterprise distribution, and no longer on Jott.com.

What to expect
After May 3rd, 2011 you’ll no longer be able to access any of the Jott services – Jott Assistant, Jott Voicemail, or Jott for Salesforce. Until then, Jott will continue to run as you’ve come to expect. You will not be charged for this last month – we’re making it free to all of our current subscribing customers, starting today, April 4th, 2011. Those of you who have paid in advance for annual or pay-as-you-go plans should expect to see a refund by June 2nd, 2011 for any unused portion of your plan as of April 4th, 2011.

How to download your information that’s on Jott.com
After May 3rd, 2011 you will no longer be able to access your jotts, voicemails, or contact information. Until May 3rd, you can download any jotts or contact information that you want to keep. We will send you a reminder, but recommend that you export the data that you want to keep as soon as possible via the following link:

It’s also recommended that you download any invoices you want to keep before May 3rd via the following link:

Once you have everything that you want to keep, you can permanently delete your account at any time via the following link:

Move your voicemail back to your carrier
If you are a Jott Voicemail customer, we recommend moving your voicemail back to your phone provider as soon as possible. This must be done before May 3rd, 2011 to avoid missed voicemails. To disable Jott Voicemail and to move your voicemail back to your carrier:

Keep in mind that you can get Nuance-powered voicemail to text from the following carriers:

Making the transition
We want to make sure that you have the necessary information to transition to another service that meets your needs. We’ve included a list of some other innovative Nuance-powered voice-to-text apps and services:

Have questions?
Please view the FAQs for more information.

Again, we want to emphasize that this wasn’t an easy decision, but we’re proud of the broad popularity of voice to text services that Jott helped to drive into the industry, and the impact that Jott’s team and technology will have worldwide through Nuance’s reach. Thank you so much for being a loyal Jott customer and advocate.

Sincerely,
The Jott Team at Nuance

Update: iOS 4 compatible Jott for iPhone app available now!
A new version of the Jott for iPhone application is now available on the iTunes App Store. This new version is compatible with Apple’s iOS 4. If you have been waiting for this new version, we’d like to thank you again for your patience and support.

Update: iOS 4 compatible Jott for iPhone app available soon!
We’ve submitted a new version of the Jott for iPhone app to Apple that is iOS 4 compatible. We’ll send out another update as soon as it goes live on the App Store. Thank you all for your patience while we worked on this, we’ll be in touch again soon!

Until the new app is available, remember that you can use:
–jott.com/mobile (to view your Jotts on your mobile phone)
–866-JOTT-123 (to call in to send Jotts with your voice from anywhere)

Dear Jotters,

If you use the Jott for iPhone application and you’ve just upgraded your iPhone’s OS to the newly released iOS 4, you may be experiencing some compatibility issues. We want to let you know that we are looking into this issue with Apple’s newest iOS, but that the Jott for iPhone application is not currently compatible with iOS 4.

If you haven’t upgraded your iPhone’s OS, please note that the Jott for iPhone application still works as usual with iOS 3 or 3.1.

We apologize for any inconvenience and will keep you posted.

All the best,
The Jott Team

Dear Jotters,

On Monday May 24th, 2010 at 10 PM Pacific (1 AM Eastern) the Jott service will undergo maintenance for approximately 4 hours. During this time you won’t be able to create jotts (from the phone number, website, or iPhone and BlackBerry apps).

If you are a Jott Voicemail customer, calls to your phone which go to voicemail during this time will be recorded and transcribed. However, until the maintenance is complete you will not receive a transcription of the message nor will you be able to hear it. If it is important that you be able to hear voicemail during this maintenance, disable forwarding of your voicemail to Jott. If you do disable voicemail forwarding to Jott, you’ll have to enable call forwarding back to Jott when the maintenance is complete.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Thank you for using Jott!
The Jott Team

Dear Jotters,

We experienced a system outage this morning that resulted in services being unavailable from approximately 9:30 am to 10:30 am Pacific time. We extend our sincere apologies to you, our customers, for this unexpected outage.

All services are back up now. Our goal is always to provide you with exceptional service and we are doing everything to prevent this from happening in the future. Again, our sincere apologies.

Best,
John, Shree, and the rest of the Jott Team

Dear Jotters,

This is to notify you that the Jott service will be going into maintenance mode starting at 8pm Pacific tonight with limited access to the Jott service. We expect this to take a half hour. By 8:30pm Pacific, you should once again have full access to all of the Jott services.

Please note that if you’re a Jott Voicemail customer, any voicemails that you receive during this time will be recorded; they will be sent to you once maintenance is complete.

Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Thanks,
The Jott Team

Yesterday Nuance (who acquired Jott back in July) announced a new iPhone app – Dragon Dictation. And so far it’s been a hit - it’s currently the #3 app in the Apple App Store’s list of Top 25 free apps.

Dragon Dictation brings the power of Dragon NaturallySpeaking to the iPhone, allowing you to speak your message, have it turned into text and put right into your iPhone’s email and text messaging apps. The app also works with the iPhone clipboard, so you can easily paste your spoken text into other applications on the iPhone, like Facebook or Twitter for instance.

You can download the Dragon Dictation app here.

This is very exciting for all of us at Nuance and we wanted to particularly thank those Jotters who helped beta test the app and provided the valuable feedback that made the app what it is today.

Stayed tuned for more iPhone news coming soon.

We just made an update to the Twitter Jott Link which allows you to turn off the audio URL that appears when Jott to Twitter.

We’ve blogged before about why you may want the audio links, but for those folks that would rather not include it in your Tweets – now you can remove it.

If you’ve already setup the Twitter Jott Link, simply browse to the My Links page at http://jott.com/myjottlinks.aspx, edit your Twitter Jott Link and check the “Do not include audio link” checkbox.

If you haven’t added the Twitter link, you can do so here: http://jott.com/myjottlinks.aspx?v=social .

We’ve also added this setting to our new Ping.Fm Jott Link, so try it out.

Just a quick heads up that Jott service will be unavailable on Monday night (October 26th) starting at 8PM Pacific, while we upgrade our systems and release some exciting new features.

We expect the maintenance to take one hour (until 9PM Pacific), during which time you won’t be able to create Jotts (from the phone number, website or iPhone and BlackBerry apps). However, any voicemails that you receive during that time will still be recorded, but you will not receive the notification until the maintenance is complete.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Dear Jotters,

We experienced an issue with one of our systems that may have affected your use of Jott for iPhone, Jott for Outlook and Jott Express from approximately 5pm last night to about noon today, Pacific Time. All other Jott services we not affected.

Providing you with outstanding service is our goal every day, and we apologize for this unplanned outage. Everything possible is being done to ensure this does not happen again. All systems are back up and running now and you should not experience any more delays. Once again, many apologies for this outage.

All the best,
- John, Shree & the rest of the Jott Team

As the number of services that Jott offers expands, we’ve been faced with
a quandary: can both the overall website, and one of the services, be
called “Jott”? Should we risk customer confusion about what’s included
with what, or do we give each service a separate name?

This wasn’t nearly as easy a decision to make as we thought. We are
going for the latter and choosing “Jott Assistant” as the product-soon-
to-be-formerly-known-as-Jott (eat your heart out Prince). For
existing customers, don’t worry: the product will continue to be the
best mobile productivity assistant around and will continue to improve
all the time, you will just see it re-branded as Jott Assistant here
and there.

An interesting side note - we all believe internally that the name
change raises the bar a bit. We’ve always focused on providing a
quality service that makes your life easier, but now there’s a pretty
direct comparison (an assistant) that we have to live up to. While we
won’t be able to make coffee anytime soon (that’s a skunk works
project that’s testing well in Seattle), our assistant works 24 hours
a day, never forgets, complains or takes sick days, and can be yelled
at without repercussions – all for a few nickels a day.

New customers, if you were looking for “Jott” don’t change the
channel: you’ve found it in “Jott Assistant”. But you should also
check out the free trials of “Jott Voicemail” and “Jott [wait for it]”
– services to help you improve your life and your business.

You’ll notice all of these changes over the next several days.

Thanks a lot!