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Voice

I had this idea a while back to create a tweet reader that speaks your tweets as they arrive (Tweaker...? meh). It would be like having a news radio feed playing in the background. The content would actually be more appropriate as a background feed than something you read periodically. You could "tune in" when you hear something interesting, and then rewind to the tweet of note or go to the web feed or whatever. Could be annoying, but maybe not.

A few days ago I got my Google Voice number. I have no plans on using it--my cell has been my primary number forever--but it may become useful. Everyone seems to love the transcribed voice mail messages. Here's Lisa's first message to me, and I assure you it resembles the actual message only in that both are in English:

Hey it's Jenny, I'm giving you a message on your new girl google voice mail. I guess I should say tinker, and everyone's search for can't find it.

So, I guess it works better for some. This transcription could eventually be used to piece together a voice corpus to have the tweet reader read in the sender's voice. Minor audio stitching and compression would make sure it doesn't sound like an audio ransom note. I suspect Google already has such a back-and-forth/text-to-voice planned for Gmail and chat and such once they get a repository built up.