You won’t be able to Jott anymore. The mobile service, which allowed users to convert voice messages to text, will be turned off on May 3rd. Started in April 2006 by former Microsofties John Pollard and Shreedhar Madhavapeddi, the Seattle company was sold to Nuance Communications in 2009.

A message on the Jott blog notes that the shut-down actually is a sign that the service has been successfully integrated into Nuance, which maintains a presence in the Seattle area due to its acquisition of several companies here.

The message notes:

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.

As of May 3rd, Nuance says that Jott Assistant, Jott Voicemail and Jott for Salesforce will no longer work. It encourages users of the service to download any stored Jotts, offering a link by which customers can download the messages. It also encourages users of the Jott voicemail product to return to their phone providers for voicemail service.

The note concludes:

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.

In a message to GeekWire, Jott co-founder Pollard said that the team continues to work on “stuff that has a few orders of magnitude broader distribution than Jott.com.”   While Pollard said that he’s sad to see Jott go, he also noted that there’s a lot of cool stuff happening at Nuance.

The company — which also has acquired Seattle companies such as Tegic and SnapIn over the years — employs several hundred people in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood.

[Hat tip to David Geller]

 

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