With all of the texting while driving bans occurring, it was only a matter of time before the market responded with a number of text-to-speech mobile apps. Motorola is a little unique with their the H17txt bluetooth headset with “MotoSpeak” so “you can stay connected and responsible on and off the road.”
The H17txt headset, which was announced on April Fools Day earlier this year, reads incoming text messages from your mobile phone and converts them to speech, reading common text shortcuts out as actual words, including favorites such as LOL, L8R, and even FML, STFU, LMAO and more.
I heard about the H17txt while reading some info about National Safety Month, which is this month. Amazingly, Motorola is promoting this high tech distraction as a traffic safety benefit, and a number of techie and automotive blogs have taken the bait and run with it.
What do you think? Are you still Driving While Intexticated if receive your texts via a synthesized voice? Could you use something like this on a bicycle?
[poll id=”6″]
Do people not make telephone calls anymore?
I mean, that's essentially what this is, right? Back to square one?
Yep — if you're using voice, why go through the trouble of text-to-speech?