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May 26, 2008 11:40 PM PDT

I just got off the TwitterFone...

by Rafe Needleman

Let's say you are so busy, you don't even have time to type in your Twitters. Then you might want to take a look at TwitterFone, which lets you, literally, phone it in. You talk. It Twitters.

I tried it and found voice recognition surprisingly good. It got my name wrong, but I've been called worse. I suspect that TwitterFone is using human-assisted voice recognition (see ReQall), which would not be an untenable strategy if the product actually generated revenue. And on that part of the equation, I'm stumped, unless TwitterFone is getting a per-call bounty from phone carriers.

Not bad. Click image to listen to the recording that generated this Tweet.

The service doesn't let you preview its transcription of your voice before it posts your Twitters. That means, in spite of its good transcription performance, you may be surprised to see the words showing up in your name. Still, putting an approval loop into the process would defeat the purpose.

TwitterFone also posts the audio of the messages it transcribes, which makes it a bit like Twittergram.

Who needs it? God only knows. But there it is.

TwitterFone is in private beta. Click here to get on the waiting list.

Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
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by cbarning May 27, 2008 6:44 AM PDT
You could also use Jott to do this, no need to wait for a beta account.

http://jott.com/jott/twitter.html
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by cbarning May 27, 2008 6:44 AM PDT
You could also use Jott to do this, no need to wait for a beta account.
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by dswartze May 27, 2008 6:44 AM PDT
Jott.com does this as well with Jott Links. In fact, from Jott I can update Twitter, my blog, my Google calendar and about another dozen other sites.
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by dswartze May 27, 2008 6:46 AM PDT
Jott.com does this as well with Jott Links. In fact, from Jott I can update Twitter, my blog, my Google calendar and about another dozen other sites.
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by orderdept May 27, 2008 11:00 AM PDT
Yeah, Jott will do it nicely. So will dial2do.com. They are in private beta, too. I've tested their service and it's a good one. With Dial2do, though, you can also send an email to someone via your voice and you can set reminders...etc.
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