No, "The Jazz Singer" (1927) wasn't the first talking film, and in fact, it was mostly silent. But Al Jolson's performance and the story of a Jewish cantor's son singing jazz created a big stir. Talking pictures evolved gradually almost from the start of film, with Edison's experiments with recordings, and multiple films with sound effects. Most early taking films were plagued with problems, associated with the bulky microphones that had to be placed near the actors which limited movement, and caught unwanted extraneous sounds, and the lack of amplification before the audion tube was invented. Anyone who watched the excellent musical film "Singing in the Rain" (1952) about the early talkies knows about the hilarious situation where the sound recording on a record disc got "out of sync" with the picture. A sound track on the film instead of a separate record eliminated that problem.
Here is an excellent and interesting summary of the evolution of talking pictures from the earliest experiments to the realization in the 1920s. A 1959 episode of "The Twentieth Century", narrarated by newsman Walter Cronkite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ould...p=QAFIAQ%3D%3D