Ideas & Opinions

Comment of the week – When driving meets messaging

By Mike on 09 October 2009

GLOBAL – It’s been another mammoth week for comments on Conversations with hundreds of great new opinions scrawled across our walls. The most commented story being tell us what to do the Nokia N900, closely followed by another N900 piece focused on a new in-depth video exploring the Maemo browser and some smart tips and tricks. Read on to find out who has earned comment of the week and a copy of the Gravity Twitter app.

This week’s winner is Gene Avenir for a comment on the N900, suggesting a solution to the issue of SMS and general messaging being prohibited in more and more territories across the globe:

Gene Avenir: “Considering that text messaging while driving is being increasingly banned throughout the world, I’d like to be able to put the N900 in “driving mode” where: 1) SMS/MMS messages are automatically read out-loud upon receipt; and 2) one can issue voice commands to dictate and send out SMS messages, and do things like send one’s current GPS location via SMS or MMS to someone.”

I’d certainly use a “driving mode”, would you? Share your comments below.

Congratulation Gene, a copy of the Gravity Twitter app is headed your way shortly.

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mbrett Says:
October 9th, 2009 at 11:50 am

What she needs is Vlingo. It will acomplish voice controlled e-mail and sms already. Just needs some link to maps to provide GPS Coordinates.

illusionado Says:
October 10th, 2009 at 2:08 am

so it will be the aide of the software engineer to put the “vlingo” features into maemo =p

Coder12 Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:34 pm

Success makes you feel like a kid on Christmas morning. ,

Gene Avenir Says:
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:15 pm

Thanks for the Gravity Twitter!! Thinking more about this, maybe the Nokia MMS apps can include “hands-free” features where the sender could record and send a short voice message (bundled with optional GPS location of the sender) via MMS/SMIL (http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/). The recipient would also have “hands-free” features to listen to the MMS/SMIL voice message, or have the phone convert the voice message converted to text that could be read if the recipient is in a quiet setting. It would be great if such a “hands-free” messaging app could convey messages via Twitter, Facebook or other services like Google Chat. “Hands-free” and voice-to-text conversion apps would also help serve those with disabilities.

As the world becomes increasingly internationalized, mixing people from a variety of language backgrounds together, I think it’s important to pass along the actual audio of the voice message. Most of the time lately I’ve seen voice-to-text work pretty well when the message is left by a native speaker. Voice-to-text breaks down when the person leaving a message has a heavy accent, where the message is really lost in translation from voice to text.

I won’t say which service performed the following voice-to-text conversion, but when a friend (native Japanese speaker) left me a voicemail message asking me if I wanted to meet up on Saturday, the service converted the voicemail to text and SMS-ed me the following…

“Hi Mrs. Deborah Mesquite DC’s they still me tomorrow from my company, company calling you anyway. Okay so sorry it’s Gene, My name’s Brian two bodies not that day that I thought that day at the day so that if you need done. I will call me okay bye bye.”

When I logged into the service’s website, I listened to her actual voicemail and this is what she really said…

“Hi Mr. XXXXX, this is YYYYYY from ZZZZZ company, how are you? Anyway, ok, I’m so sorry, uhhh, do you have any plans for this saturday… sat-tur—day… Saturday! Uh, if you don’t have, call me, okay, bye bye.”

Now if that were an MMS/SMIL message sent to me, I could’ve listened to the voice attachment on my phone (Nokia 5800) when I saw the text was mis-interpreted. [In the process of writing this, I logged into the online voicemail service and figure out how to route the voicemail to my phone's email address, now I have visual voicemail just like that crappy iPhone/AT&T combo ].

So the infrastructure is already in place, it’s just a matter of making the hands-free interface.

Anyway, however it is accomplished, it would be nice to see hands-free texting and Tweeting, and see devices like the N900 and others really take advantage of standards like SMIL.