First Look at Twitterfone

TWITTER WORKS BEST for me when it's fast and the new Twitterfone speech-to-text service fulfills that mission requirement nicely. Being able to talk tweets would help the iPhoners who have to fumble around while trying to text on the touchscreen. It would also make tweeting easier to do while driving. I played around with Twitterfone, calling its Irish landline number six times in a half hour, watching Twitterfone post five of my six messages within three minutes of my phone calls. The missed post probably was a result of my phone losing its signal, not Twitterfone failing to convert my talking to text for publishing. My first impression is that Twitterfone's simple and easy-to-use method will help me in the field of education technology. It will assist dyslexic students in their submission of assigned work and it will facilitate me in making a river of audio feedback available to students.

To get started with Twitterfone, I went to the main site, indicated my desire to try out the alpha version of the service. Within 10 minutes, I got a text message to my mobile phone with a four-digit code that I used on the website to verify my identity. I told Twitterfone my user name and password for Twitter and started ringing in my tweets.

Twitterfone transcribed my voice, and posted to Twitter along with a link to the recording that it made. Here's mine. You can follow my Twitterfone mistakes by monitoring twitter.com/topgold if you wish.

I discovered that I could talk longer than 140 characters, but Twitterfone transcribes only 140 characters. The remaining element is kept as an audio archive. There is a time limit of 15 seconds on the recording.

It bears mentioning that Twitterfone is just one of the technologies demonstrated at an Irish OpenCoffee meet-up. Pat Phelan demonstrated his way-alpha idea for the Cork contingent a few weeks ago. Now it's public and enjoying a bit of a viral effect. A rabid enthusiasm could actually hurt Twitter's reliability because if hundreds of people every minute call in their tweets, the API burden on Twitter might strain the system to a point of showing a broken robin more than a screen filled with information.

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Michael Arrington -- "Use Twitterfone for Easy Voice to Text on Twitter"
Pat Phelan -- "Twitterfone Launches. Speak your Tweets."
Conor O'Neill -- "Now that's a Launch! Say Hello to Twitterfone."
James Galvin -- "Voice-Enabling Twitter"
Will Knott -- "Can you say Tweet?"
Alexia Golez -- "Twitterfone sounds like success"
Michael Arrington -- "Spinvox are providing tools"

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