Parrot launches hands-free text/email messaging

Rating: GoMobile News discovers how to do so with Nokia Lumia 800

French supplier, Parrot, best known for its Android power vehicle audio centre – the Asteroid, has just launched a service which it is calling ‘TextFriendly’. The whole aim is to provide a service whereby any mobile phone user can manage his or her own communications such as text messages or emails – hands-free. Obviously, TextFriendly works using voice recognition technology but weren’t not sure which major player has provided it. Nuance, perhaps? We’re also guessing that it is actually a white-labelled offering – possibly from a company called QRC. Anyway, GoMobile News has tested the system out and provided it works really quite well. The snag is that we don’t quite know what the costs are.The first thing to do is sign yourself up for the service at http://www.textfriendlyclient.com.

This is far easier to do from the desktop than from the actual mobile phone itself.

For testing purposes, we signed in for the free trial. This almost certainly restricted what we were able to do but still enabled to prove the service really does work.

Judging from the sign up process, the service is currently supported in seven countries. The list includes: – USA, Canada, Spain, France, Australia and New Zealand as well as the UK.

The important point is that in order to utilise TextFriendly, you have to dial a local number.

In the UK this is a regular landline number so with any luck, you can use the service without going outside your normal allocated minutes.

Once you’ve efficiently signed up – and Parrot is hoping you will employ TextFriendly whilst using one of its many hands-free in-vehicle devices, you can then start adding in your personal data.

To import all of your existing contact details into the TextFriendly service, the system provides all the instructions you should need.

Basically, you export a .csv file from the likes of Gmail or Windows Live and that adds it to your online addressbook.

The system also enables you to set up a default email account for when you send your email messages.

You can also set TextFriendly to ‘Tweet’ or update you Facebook posts. All this can be done whilst travelling along hands-free.

Here comes the only tricky bit. How do you dial into TextFriendly whilst driving along?

The service suggests you use a speed dial number. However, we were testing the service using our trusty Nokia Lumia 800 W7 Mango handset.

WP7 has, of course, got voice recognition built in. All you have to do is hold down the middle (Windows logo) button and then tap of the screen against the ‘Speak’ icon.

Then you can say, “Call Text Friendly” and it will connect you to the service.

Overall, GoMobile News was really quite impressed with the service offered by TextFriendly.

We suspect, however, that given you have to pay for the full service, it is best suited to those with featurephones not smartphones.

Given enough effort, you could probably buy a number of apps that would provide all of this functionality.

It’s an interesting move, nonetheless. This is the mobile cloud competing against native apps and Parrot my very well have judged that there’s a market for such services.