Aswath Weblog

Extending Speak2Tweet

Recently two Googlers came up with a service that lets people call a phone number and leave a message, then posts a link to the message to Twitter. The service called Speak2Tweet that was developed over a weekend allowed people to communicate and coordinate protest against the Egyptian government which cut off Internet and cellphone service. Google had setup phone numbers in three different countries. A couple of days later, a similar service with access numbers in multiple countries was made available. (Unfortunately, I am not able to locate a link to this service.) A third variation of this service with human assisted translation and transcription was also introduced.

As commendable as these efforts are there are some fundamental problems that need to be addressed if this service concept sees wider adoption. A story that appeared in USA Today describes two of them:

1. There is no way to calibrate whether the caller is conveying valid information or not. Indeed Vodafone subsequently stated that the government used emergency powers to send mass SMS messages, but with out identifying the sender. So it is conceivable the government can use its supporters to call in and provide misleading information.
2. Since this service concept is new, many potential callers did not know the existence of such a service and organizers didn’t have a way to disseminate the access numbers.

So recognizing that the service concept is useful and applicable in other situations - both political and apolitical - it will be useful to develop a more general, scalable version of this service. That is the objective of this post.

In abstraction, the idea of the service is to record a caller’s voice and post a link (with translation and transcription) to Twitter where the recorded message can be played. Many of us have voicemail that can of course record callers’ voice. Since our phone numbers act as access numbers, there is no need to disseminate them. The owners of voice mail account can act as translators and transcribers. So the only thing that needs to be developed is for the callers to instruct the voice mail system that the message must be sent out as a tweet under the voice mail owner’s name, with owner specified tag. Since the tweets will be under the owner’s name and normally the owner’s friends will be using this service, the credibility of the tweets could be associated with the owner.

A possible use case scenario is the following: I administer my voice mail account to prompt the callers to enter a specified digit if they want the message to be tweeted with a specified hashtag. Then the caller enters the specific digit and the system will be ready to record the message. After the caller completes the message the voice mail system can generate a tweet, just as Speak2Tweet does. If necessary I can hear the message and update the tweet with translation and transcription.

Such a service meets the service objectives of Speak2Tweet and also addresses the identified issues like scalability, authentication and access number dissemination. I hope Google Voice, Skype In, Ribbit Mobile and others consider including this capability as part of their service.