Yglesias on phone calls
I really wish competition among cellular operators was robust enough that it would be possible to buy a smart phone with data and SMS but no voice plan whatsoever.
Indeed. I should add, there are times when it is convenient to speak a message, and there are times when it is convenient to hear a message. Yet, most of these times don’t overlap and speech-to-text and text-to-speech should be able to solve that for us.
There are times when you want to more or less have a tele-meeting with someone and video conferencing applications should be able to take care of that.
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
Sunday ~ March 20th, 2011 at 7:45 pm
younggoodman
you could probably use the data plan from a mobile modem and google voice to much the same effect.
Monday ~ March 21st, 2011 at 10:04 am
Corey Mutter
As I understand it, the state of the art in speech-to-text is not very purple monkey dishwasher. (Much relies on statistical text analysis, so the less restricted the text domain, the less likely a speech recognition program can get it write).
Monday ~ March 21st, 2011 at 1:23 pm
IVV
I’m sure it’s because I’m old fashioned, but when I want to speak with someone, I want to speak with someone, and that involves listening, too.
I’ve removed texting capability from my phone plan. Neither my wife or I can receive or send text messages. We don’t miss it at all. However, we also don’t have smart phones.