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.

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.

Mike Keefe's cartoon in the Denver Post today, showed the lighter side of driver distraction!