There are now 30 States that ban texting while driving, 11 of these laws were enacted in 2010.  It's pretty obvious that if you're looking down at your phone rather than at the road that you're more likely to get into trouble.  Yet people still continue to do it.  Next time you have the urge, use your voice to dicate your message through Voice Assist, rather than using the keyboard on your phone.

To get the latest information about the laws in your State, check out the Governors Highway Safety Association.  TheThe site includes a comprehensive overview State-by-State.

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.

With all this discussion about "distracted driving", articles like this one by David Coursey in Computer World are coming to the same conclusions as we did. 

"Better speech technology could make texting while driving more than dangerous, it would become obsolete. No longer would it be necessary for a driver to read teensy words from a tiny screen or type using an equally downsized keyboard--these could be replaced by simply talking and listening".

With speech recognition based services there's no need for a keypad, you just use your voice to say what you want to do.  For example, to make a call using Voice Assist you just say "Call" followed by the name of a person in your address book, or to send a text message you say "Text" and the name of the person.  Voice Assist also allows you to use simple speech commands to listen and reply to your email.  So for example, you can say" next" and "previous" to navigate through the list of emails, and "reply" to compose a message back.

Simple speech commands make it really easy to things done.  No keypad required.

Next time you're driving past a truck on the highway check to see if he/she is texting.  A recent in-cab study of truckers by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute showed the risks associated with texting is greater than previous thought.  They found that when the drivers texted, their risk of collision was 23 times higher than when not texting.

The primary reason?  The time the drivers take their eyes off the road to text.  In just 5 seconds, the typical time spent looking at the device, a lot can happen when travelling at speed on a busy highway. 

So even though texting is not illegal in all States, think twice about it next time you need to send a text, and consider voice texting to ensure your eyes stay on the road.

In the news this week, the story of a girl who fell down a manhole while sending a text message (WWT - walking while texting).  It's one of many stories about accidents happening while people are trying to text and do something else at the same time.  Clearly, when you're looking at the phone's screen, you're not paying attention to the other things around you.

So while we talk alot about voice texting being valuable in the car, it's equally valuable when you're walking, running, or biking and need to send a text message.  Yes, even biking!  We had one of our staff try out Voice Assist while he was riding his bike.  We like to be thorough with our testing!