Not so long ago, we showed a few ways of integrating voice and the web. Blogbard would stand for text-2-voice. Blogtalkradio would stand for voice-in-rss. But now, the new kid on the block that sits on top of twitter, twitterfone, arrives to show us all what voice-2-text really means. Well, I can't argue that I've tried it out yet - cuz I haven't - for two reasons:
1 - I live in Portugal,
2 - I'm not yet registered in their private beta guest list (hope I will soon enough, though).
What does it do? Well, you simply make a call and talk your tweet in less than a minute. The twitterfone service will translate your recorded voice into text and update your twitter status with it while adding a link to the recording. Simple yet powerful.
Here's a video from this guy who really tried it out (you can see that he's pretty amazed with this service):
Also, nearly on the same level, there already exists this clever hack on top of Blogtalkradio called Twittergram. It basically does the same thing as twitterfone, except that it doesn't translates the recorded message to text (and that's a huge difference).
This could signal a new trend in the mobile web. I really feel that voice-2-text will be a big deal for mobile web-apps ...
This raises an important issue that concerns me, as a mobile-web early-adopter wannabe: I HATE HAVING TO TYPE ANYTHING ON MY PHONE. That's why I almost never send any tweets. The mobile platform is great for reading stuff and browsing around with the phone's joypad, but it's just not comfortable enough for typing. Forget it, I'll never get used to it. And that's why I feel we'll see more of this voice-2-text trending. Voice is the natural way to send commands, messages and content to the phone. It should be the natural way to do anything you want with it: tweet messages, browse the internet ("Google this", "Google that", "weather in lisbon?", etc...), phone some contact...
What do you think? Do you feel comfortable typing messages with your mobile device?
