If you're already bored of getting English translated to Mandarin through JaJah, TwitterFone, another mobile service with voice recognition savvy, has put out a neat update that's sure to burn through your mobile phone minutes. You can now listen to the last 10 tweets from your Twitter pals and respond to any of them that you'd like using the same speech-to-text system in place for publishing tweets of your own.
It's certainly not as fast or easy to parse voice messages as the mobile version of Twitter (m.twitter.com), but if you're on an older handset and don't have a data plan, this is about as easy as it gets to stay in touch with Twitter without buying new hardware. It's also nice enough to list the full names of Twitter users, not just their user name, which could be a good or bad thing depending on how well you know the people you're following.
One thing that was slightly off for me was the time stamping, with tweets from just a few minutes ago being listed as a full hour behind, at least according to TwitterFone's automated system. I'm assuming this is a kink that will be worked out in the future. Otherwise, if you're a big fan of sitting back and enjoying some blurbs from your friends while on the go (spoken like sweet nothings by a female robot), then TwitterFone is right up your alley.
TwitterFone is still in private beta.
Related: Dial2Do: Speak your Twitters, e-mails, SMS messages and more
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.
- prev
- 1
- next
