This Christmas, BT have clogged the airwaves with their commercial for their fantastic new service which translates your text message into a voicemail. You text “see you later” and a robotic voice says “see you later” to the recipient. Now, am I missing something here? Since virtually everyone has an answer machine on their phone, wouldn’t it be easier to just say “see you later” for the recipient to hear your message spoken by you? We seem to losing sight of what phones are for. I understand the next breakthrough is a system where you dial someone, and when they pick up, you will be able to talk to them, just like a real conversation. Marvellous…
It’s good to talk by Dr Rob Spence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I’ve not seen the ads, Rob, but isn’t this supposed to make it possible to text a message from a mobile to a landline phone? I can imagine that being cheaper & more convenient than making a voice call between the two. It also has a lot of potential for visually impaired users.
Maybe, but surely if you are visually impaired it’s easier to speak than to text?
The potential is for sighted users to text the visually impaired.
The visually impaired will probably want to ring up and have their voice turned to text for the hard of hearing.
I hadn’t thought of this. The advert shows the surrogate dad texting on behalf of the son to convince the daughter that son has a girlfriend…