New Toy, O-E-O (apologies to Thomas Dolby and Lene Lovich)

I've been playing with a neat technology for mobile blogging. It allows you to phone in your blog post--literally. Using speech-to-text recognition, it transcribes your voice into text, then posts it to a blog. A preproduction demo of the system is available here. It's based on the same technology that powers the SpinVox voicemail-to-text-message system.

To test it out, I Skyped "speakablogblog" and, after a prompt, spoke out loud the just-prior post on broadband (I discarded three takes as I learned the system, and posted the fourth). You could call a phone number as well--they're listed on the test blog page.

Five minutes after hanging up, my post was online. If you'd like to read it, here it is. You'll notice that it is not a perfect capture of the written post, but it's not bad--especially for a first go.

Here are some things I'll have to do to get the best use of the tool:

Shorten the posts--I had to cut about two-thirds of the information on the post to get it to fit in the 30-second time limit (which I'm sure is configurable). A two-minute limit would allow me to fit in any of my posts.

Simplify the language somewhat--the system had the most trouble with slang (brand instead of bang) and acronyms (it couldn't understand WiFi and WiMAX--but many don't!). It translated woefully as roughly, and misspelled oligopoly. Speaking a bit more slowly would help, I'm sure.

Also, the difficulty of indicating punctuation results in a more casual post than one composed at the keyboard.

But I see a lot of potential in this technology. The sheer simplicity of dialing a number (or selecting a contact), speaking your message, and having it appear on your blog is really cool.

It would be easy thereafter to edit the post online, or simply create an idiom expressly for the spoken posts.

I can't wait till I can use it for this blog.

mobile, blogging, technology, blogs, innovation