Is phone technology coming full circle?

jtbell

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/19/v....html?hpt=Sbin

And the next step will surely be voice-synthesizing phones that can "speak" text messages to you. Or do these exist already?

Mororvia

I believe the Droid can translate voicemails to text. It wouldn't be hard to add software to speak text.

zomgwtf

It's not really full-circle. The voice recognition software is really not that great, you say call it thinks you said internet. Somehow they sound similar. For a voice recognition software to be able to take what you are saying and make it into a text-message that is definitely new and quite high-tech relative to what's available. Even speech recognition software on the computer can't do that effectively unless you spend big money.

Kronos5253

They sure do. They make it for people who have bad eyesight, considering how tiny font usually is on a cellphone. It's usually for seniors.

100% true, although it's not always that bad.

zomgwtf

It also works if you send a text message to a land phone. It speaks the text message to you and it's actually pretty understandable.

leroyjenkens

I hope it teaches people to enunciate. A computer isn't bound to the proprieties of not telling people they're mush-mouths.

BobG

If you could speak your text message, have the person you're communicating with hear it in words, and have the other person immediately reply in real-time in a spoken text message that would be converted into a spoken message you could hear - plus have it done in each speaker's real voice?

That would be positively awesome, dude! It would be like...... well.... almost like a telephone, but lots cooler because it would use all those cool texting abbreviations like 511, RBAY, STB, and ST&D!

The big problem is how it would handle those situations where you're ROTFLUTS. There's no telling what text your sounds would be converted to, nor how the receiver would react to it.

DaveC426913

Is that what my wife got here at home the other day? She said she got a phone call that was a text message (que???) for me.

Galteeth

Its funny. There are some people who will refuse to talk on the phone and only use text (in my observation usually girls), and it turns a one minute conversation intom a thirty minute conversation. It's like, who needs the phone, let's go back to the telegraph [STOP]