I was watching the other day our good men Steve Jobs doing a demo of NeXT back in 1990 and marveled at the “lips” service which he uses (around 1m50s) to reply through a voice message to an email. I thought, what the heck, it’s 2010 and we still don’t have this?!? And they had it back in 1990! Needless to say I was puzzled. Next step was I searched the web a bit to find the solutions out there that allowed me to integrate something like this in GMail. The ones I found were hum.. not that good. So I build this simple GMail gadget using the HTML5 Speech attribute. If you don’t know how it works it’s basically a speech-to-text input box.
To use it you’ll need one of the latest versions of the Google Chrome browser. To install first go to GMail Settings -> Labs and enable ‘Add any gadget by URL’. Then go to Settings -> Gadgets and add the gadget url:
http://tech.morgadinho.org/codebits2010/lips.xml
You should then see it installed, something like this:
It currently uses a script on one of my servers to deliver the e-mails since I couldn’t find a way of telling GMail itself to do it (if you do let me know). But ideally what I wanted is to able to reply to a message via this feature all from within GMail and using speech-to-text. Now Google please implement it right and make it beautiful :-)
You can find the code on github:
https://github.com/nunomorgadinho/lips4gmail
And here’s the demo:
Here’s the video I mentioned of our dear Steve:
It would be very nice to have it integrated with the email 'composition tool'
Nice! This makes even more sense in a mobile context.