Do *not* send e-mails from the car . . . without Jott.

I noticed this past year that I was getting e-mails from students with the "sent from my Blackberry" imprint during times that I knew they were in traffic. I'll admit that I have been known to place or take a cell phone call in my car without using my hands-free earpiece. But I try to wait until I'm completely out of the car before I begin typing.

Interestingly, a couple of former Microsoft nerds in Seattle have come up with a free service so folks can send e-mails and text messages from their cell phones and not have to resort to typing in the car. Sending yourself or someone else a voice message that turns into a text message or e-mail is also faster (sometimes) than stopping what you're doing to send the e-mail or text from your cell phone. Of course, many of you have likely already come up with a way to send yourself messages during your commute. My favorite has always been just calling my office phone or home phone to remind myself of things. But if I had my druthers, I'd prefer to send myself an e-mail (those who know me know that I barely pick up voice mail anymore -- it's so 90's!).

So that's where Jott comes in. Technology Review explains:

You can "jott" by calling Jott's toll-free number from your cell phone,
specifying who should receive your message (for example, "myself" or "family"),
and dictating for up to 30 seconds. Within minutes, your message or reminder is
transcribed and e-mailed or text-messaged to the appropriate parties.

You can also link Jott to your Google Calendar and put things on your calendar through this service. That's great for me, because I'm constantly telling people that I'd love to have lunch next week, then writing it on the next piece of scrap paper I find, and then waking up at 3:00 a.m. wondering if I'm supposed to be having lunch with someone the next day.

You have to be wondering, as I did, how well Jott transcribes different accents. For example, I tried Naturally Speaking a few years back to transcribe voice comments to print comments on student papers while I had pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. Native Texans who don't leave Texas have a hell of a time training voice recognition programs. Today, I have the same Texas twang with just a dash of year-on-Long-Island. So I tried a message that I thought was sure to confound whatever trasncription technology Jott uses: "buy waffles" -- which sounds a little like "bah walfulls" when I say it. And the damndest things happened. I got an e-mail from Jott that said "buy waffles" -- success!!

I discovered after a little research that the transcription technology is actually people in India manually transcribing the notes and sending the e-mails. (Isn't it funny how, when we were kids, we thought technology was run by people inside the device actually doing tasks manually, and now that's how technology actually works?) For most law professors' purposes, that's fine. However, you obviously wouldn't want to use this for something you wouldn't want to hand over in discovery.

As for its teaching applications, it could be very handy to have it set up with student e-mail addresses if you needed to cancel class or change the location of class with very little notice. Any other ideas?