During the protests in Egypt, Google unveiled a new service to facilitate communication between Egyptians without access to the Internet. Users can call one of three phone numbers and leave messages, which will then be posted to the Twitter account with the hashtag #egypt.
The service does not provide a transcription from the spoken message to a textual Tweet, but instead creates a link to a recording. No identifying information appears to be recorded in these tweets aside from the voice of the speaker. Many of the tweets on Speak2Tweet are in Egyptian Arabic, although some English and French can be heard. A providing translations of the tweets into English.
Services like Tweet Call transcribe voice recordings to text for posting on Twitter, but largely operate only for English. Speech recognition software exists for Arabic, including Egyptian Arabic, which could be employed for transcription of the spoken tweets. If Google could integrate language recognition technology for non-English languages, Speak2Tweet might be the start of a multilingual tweeting transcription service, which could then be translated via Google’s translation engines. This technology may not only facilitate communication across languages, but also reduce the threat to communication created by Internet outages.
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-LBC
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