I’ve been playing around with the beta release of Jott [http://jott.com/] and it’s an interesting example of the potential for the cell phone to become the next search interface. It’s a free service that allows you to give it a call, it recognizes your phone number as an account holder, and then transcribes your messages for broadcast out to yourself or others as an email.
Playing around with the service, it definitely has some downsides. My first test message wasn’t very well planned and I haltingly said something like “umm, test message to myself”. When I got the email, the transcription read “Tapped own weapons”. A couple more emails like that and I’ll get a visit from the FBI!
I can see something like this being used in a library if a patron wanted to save an overheard citation (as an example) and email it to their account. So my next message was the following:
Pitts, M. G., & Browne, G. J. (2007). Improving requirements elicitation: An empirical investigation of procedural prompts. Information Systems Journal, 17, 89-110.
The transcription for this took several minutes, at least several minutes for the email to arrive, and when it did arrive it read like this:
Pip and Brown 2007 improving requirements [unclear speech, please listen] and imperial investigation of procedural prompts. Information system Journal IM-17, page of 89 to 110.
While that’s not perfect, there’s enough information there to figure out what I was trying to remember. Also, the email arrives with a speaker/audio icon which allows me to listen to the original message.
It seems we’re a long way off because of the quality of transcriptions, but applying this technology to an OPAC search doesn’t seem quite so distant now.
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