Review - Twitterfone - You Speak, It Tweets!
Twitterfone is something to really get excited about. To cut a long story short and save you from reading the rest of this most likely very boring blog post, Twitterphone allows you to send tweets by recording a voice message with your phone. This service is currently in closed beta but invites are slowly being made available. You can request one by going to http://twitterfone.com.
How it works
Like most of these these, you have to set up an account first and in this case register your mobile number with the service. They need your number in order to know who is sending the tweet! Once the account is set up you can start tweeting straight away by simply dialing the number and leaving a message. And that is it! This number also allows you to listen to messages.
You get up to thirty seconds to record your message and if you go over the 140 characters twitter allows, it's no problem because Twitterfone also puts a link to the audio at the end of your tweet.
All of the Twitterfone numbers as far as I know are non geographic land line numbers so you shouldn't incur any premium rate costs but it might be worth checking with your network operator first to see what the cost is because it can vary from network to network.
On test
Once my beta code came through I just had to give it a go and I'll be honest with you, I really wanted it to fail. Not because I'm a horrible person but because speech recognition gone wrong can yield some very funny results. Suffice to say it didn't fail at all no matter what I tried.
Obviously the first call I made to the service was a standard "hello world" test call. Nothing exciting and it passed with flying colours. The next call needed to be more tricky so I put on my best southern scumbag accent and let rip... It still didn't fail, even though I was dropping "t"s and glottal stopping all over the place. I was very impressed!
So it was time to get dirty. What would happen if I beatboxed down the phone at it? I'll tell you what happens... It just keeps working. It recognised what I said before and after the beatboxing and just left out what it didn't understand to be speech. You can hear the beatbox test here:
Verdict
I love it. It works. You don't need to train it to your voice like most speech recognition applications. Whether or not I will actually use it remains to be seen but as I use a Windows mobile the thought of being able to tweet without using that stupid stylus to type seems like a breath of fresh air. I can't really give it a mark out of ten or anything like that because there is no benchmark to work against. Twitterfone is the benchmark for speech recognition based Twitter applications and the bar has been set very high indeed.
Other stuff
What's really exciting about this for me is the fact that it proves speech recognition is possible without training and can not only recognise any voice but can distinguish voice from noise without too much trouble. This will one day allow web video and audio content to become more search engine and accessibility friendly AT LAST! The future is here!
Filed under //
Category: Social media
mobile
review
social media
techforce
twitter
twitterfone
voice
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