#606 Quality Communication

So I have this friend. He has all the latest technological gear. PDA blackberry thingies. One of his thingies has voice-activated stuff on it. It can access his email and read it aloud to him.
That’s right, it reads his email.
I suppose there will come a time in my life where it becomes important to be out driving and have to check my email so urgently I need to have it read out loud to me.
Although with some of the spam I get, I’m guessing it would be wise on such occasion to not have the proverbial preacher’s wife as a passenger.
Some of this spam is pretty graphic. I’m guessing she’d be less than interested in drugs that my increase the size of my, um, portfolio. A larger and better performing portfolio is the dream of every aging yuppie in America but there’s a time and a place for everything.
And the thing to remember with any wonder stock is, there’s always going to be a correction...and a downturn.
So anyhow, having my PDA read me my spam could be problematic.
My friend’s phone also has voice-activated texting. That means you can tell it to text and it will transform your spoken words into a text message.
It will also read texting that someone else sent you aloud.
So let’s see. You pick up your phone, tell it you want to text. You say a message aloud then tell it to send the message to another person.
The other person hears his phone ring, sees it’s a text and tells his phone to read the text aloud. He hears your message and replies in kind.
Okay, I think I got it. You have your voice transformed into the written word by incredibly expensive-to-develop software on a pretty darn expensive piece of hardware. You send your message to another person’s expensive hardware where his expensive software decodes it and reads the written message out loud to him.
Not only that, it reads it out loud in a cold, impersonal, inflectionless, easy-to-misunderstand computer voice.
Who says technology doesn’t make communication better?
Just calling someone and talking sounds so...primitive.
America, ya gotta love it