Bob Dylan reported yesterday that he's been approached by a couple of satellite navigation companies to be "the voice" of their system.  Seems like someone that sings a lot about traveling would know his way around!  

Using personality voices in sat-nav systems is part of a growing trend.  According to an article in the British Telegraph the most popular voices by vendor are: 

• Navtones.com, which offers a range of voices, lists its top five downloads in Britain as Mr T, Miss Cattrall, and the American actors Dennis Hopper, Gary Busey and Burt Reynolds.
• TomTom, the leading satnav manufacturer, said its most popular voices were John Cleese, Mr T, Dennis Hopper, Burt Reynolds and a Victor Meldrew impersonation.
• Halfords' most popular downloaded voices – which are all done by impersonators – are Matt Lucas, Victor Meldrew, Julian Clary, Ozzy Osbourne and Sean Connery. Impersonations of the Queen, the comedian Peter Kay and the American actor David Hasselhoff are all to be made available soon.

"Catchphrases and distinctive mannerisms of the personality voice pepper their instructions to drivers. Kim Cattrall deploys the sexual innuendos of her screen character Samantha; while John Cleese speaks in the same fussy style as his character Basil Fawlty, in the television series Fawlty Towers. " 

A recent study at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, looked at the effects of texting on 11 -14 year olds.

"The kids who used their phones a lot were faster on some of the tests, but were less accurate. We suspect that using mobile phones a lot, particularly tools like predictive texts for SMS, is training them to be fast but inaccurate. Their brains are still developing so if there are effects then potentially it could have effects down the line, especially given that the exposure is now almost universal. The use of mobile phones is changing the way children learn and pushing them to become more impulsive in the way they behave."

So if these kids moved to voice texting rather than using predictive texting would this make them less impulsive?  They certainly would be more articulate. 

As reported in the Daily Tech, the top free email service online is Yahoo Mail with 106.1 million visitors last month. That's more than twice the monthly visitors of it's nearest competitors, Hotmail (47.1 million visitors in July) and Gmail (36.9 million visitors in July).  Gmail however is growing rapidly and recently beat AOL for the number 3 spot.

If you're a user of one of these popular email services, it's very simple to add your account information to Voice Assist and get instant access to your email by phone.  Just enter your user name and password and you're done.  We provide automatic set-up for over 130 email providers to date and growing daily.  If we don't currently have your providers email server information then you can manually set it up. 

If you haven't already experienced Voice Assist's email by phone then it works by converting the email text to voice so you can listen to it.  This is particularly useful when you're in a hands-busy environment, like the car.  For example, you can listen to your email while in traffic and use the time more productively.  Listen to what it sounds like in our new Voice Assist email by phone video.

Back in March, Postini reported that 94% of all email is spam!  If you're lucky you have a great spam filter and most of it never reaches you. But if you think spam is annoying on your computer based mail client, it’s even more annoying when you’re listening to your email by phone. 

That’s why Voice Assist doesn’t read anything tagged as spam and we’re adding more user controls so you can be very specific about which email you want to hear.  We understand that when you’ve only got a few minutes to listen to email you only want to hear the important ones.

So when you're listening to your emails by phone and have an idea for how you'd like to filter what you hear, let us know.  Use our feedback form to talk directly to the development team.

Even before all this talk in Washington about a nationwide ban on texting while driving, a number of States already had legislation on the books.

The Governers Highway Safety Association (GHSA) has an up-to-date list of the laws in each State related to texting while driving, cell phone use while driving, and handsfree laws. 

Current state cell phone driving law highlights include the following:

• Handheld Cell Phone Bans for All Drivers: 6 states (California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Washington), the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands prohibit all drivers from talking on handheld cell phones while driving.
  • With the exception of Washington State, these laws are all primary enforcement—an officer may ticket a driver for using a handheld cell phone while driving without any other traffic offense taking place.
• All Cell Phone Bans: No state completely bans all types of cell phone use (handheld and hands-free) for all drivers, but many prohibit cell phone use by certain segments of the population.
  • Novice Drivers: 20 states and the District of Columbia ban all cell use by novice drivers.
  • School Bus Drivers: In 16 states and the District of Columbia, school bus drivers are prohibited from all cell phone use when passengers are present.
• Text Messaging: 17 states and the District of Columbia now ban text messaging for all drivers.
  • Novice Drivers: 9 states prohibit text messaging by novice drivers.
  • School Bus Drivers: 1 state restricts school bus drivers from texting while driving.
• Preemption Laws: 8 states have laws that prohibit local jurisdictions from enacting restrictions. In 6 other states, localities are allowed to ban cell phone use.
• Some states, such as Utah and New Hampshire, treat cell phone use as a larger distracted driving issue.
  • Utah considers speaking on a cellphone to be an offense only if a driver is also committing some other moving violation (other than speeding).