Darwin is alive and well!

[Roger Mills]

[Andy Cap]

... and his parents were going on about what a careful and safe driver he was, as if this was the first time he'd texted at the wheel. His father even said 'We've all done it'.

[JimK]

Nice pic of him in a strip joint....

Jim K

[Mike Barnes]

So safe and careful that presumably he *volunteered* to go on a speed awareness course. Nothing to do with being caught speeding, of course.

[Adrian]

awareness-course.html

I suspect tiredness from a 12-hour night shift followed immediately by a morning in a classroom couldn't possibly have contributed either.

"He'd recently changed phone, and his new one didn't fit in the dash holder..." Ever tried sending a text from a phone in a dash holder...? Not exactly easy...

[whisky-dave]

Well if you can't text safely from any situation you really shouldn't be txting should you ?

[Caecilius]

"the fatal text [message]" reminded me of the monty python funniest joke in the world sketch.

[ARW]

Yes

I gave up trying.

[fred]

I think that's what he said . . . . . .

Perhaps too subtly (there's a first :-)

[damduck-egg]

Is a phone made that has a speech to text facility that a message could be dictated to and then sent?

I had a Tom Tom satnav that interfaced with a phone and read an incoming text message aloud, mixed success that seemed to depend on where the text originated. Messages from phones seemed to work, from the works system where the text originated from a PC keyboard and the facility would actually have been useful it didn't.

G.Harman

[john james]

Yes, Siri on an iphone can do that. At least one of the attempts at an equivalent on droids can too.

[spuorgelgoog]

Yes.

A blind friend has one.

It's really disconcerting when he's dictating to it, even more than overhearing a conversation.

Owain

[Chris French]

In message , john james writes

Yup, the Google speech recognition on recent Android phones is very good.

I don't tend to use it much, but it does work well. (Winodws Phone has Cortana and it also seems to work fine)

Mine can be set to try and recognise when you are driving (crude, it does it on speed of travel I think, but I think if I wanted to it can be set to recognise the car bluetooth) and offer to read out the message.

[The Other Mike]

How the f*ck did he find the time to attend a speed awareness course in York in the morning and then drive 30+ miles along the A614, a shitty road with a 60 limit and crash at just after 1pm? 59mph all the way, 29mph through every village?

[Nightjar]

What was he texting, his appreciation of the speed awareness course?

[whisky-dave]

Maybe he thought the courses aim was to make you better at speeding and txting at the same time.

[Dave Liquorice]

With variable results but generally you can get the intended meaning when Siri gets soon worms axed up.

I've never played with the Samsung S Voice thing, the disclaimer that pops up when you try to turn it on puts me well off. I also assume it needs a net connection to work.

You need to look at Trigger, that will detect the cars Bluetooth and configure the phone for "driving". It can use quite a few things as "triggers", WiFi, Bluetooth & NFC tags for free, battery, time, charging, headset, calendar event, agent or geolocation are pay for, not sure if that's individual pay for or just a one off for the "pro" upgrade. Once you have trigger selected you can then set up loads of actions with many actions per trigger. I use it with NFC tags to set the phone up for "home" or "out" use.

It would be up to the text app to do the text to speech thing and up to that app if it can be switched into text to speech by another app.

[john james]

I've found it does work pretty well for speech to text.

Not so well for navigation, but that isn't very surprising given the complexity of street and town names.

And it can be very stupid indeed with navigation, wanting to direct me to Wall St NY instead of Waugh St in my town and is too stupid to consider what town I am in. Doesn't even allow you to spell out Waugh St either.

Presumably that will improve over time as they refine the system.

Works pretty well for phone dialling and I use that most of the time. The most you have to do is do it again sometimes.

That wasn't the one I was thinking of.

That would be quite handy for auto answering incoming phone calls in some specific situations.

iOS won't allow that under any circumstances, essentially because it is too much of a security risk, allowing someone to snoop on you if the ringer is disabled and auto answer is enabled.

[Dave Liquorice]

Google was mentioned and as I have a healthy distrust of google when it comes to telling it where I am and what I'm doing etc

TBH I don't know if Trigger can toggle auto answer, pretty sure it can set the ringer to zero though. I don't know as there are so many things it can tweak I've not been through them all, even if I had I'm not sure I'd remember all of them.

[john james]

Not by me.

I couldn't care less and use google maps just because its better than the alternatives, particularly the street view.

Its also vastly better in that it accepts corrections very quickly.

Apple maps just ignores corrections completely.