Proud Geek

As if ringing cellphones aren’t annoying enough, now there’s an utility that actually speaks the words of SMS / text messages that people send to your Palm Treo. Can you imagine the cacophony (had to look up the spelling, hence the link) of cellphones literally talking to their masters all over restaurants, subways, and office meetings?!

Thank goodness I’m deaf. :-P

SpeakSMS by ToySoft Development is an application for Palm Treo 650 / 680 / 700p / 755p (running on Palm OS only) that adds a nice set of features to the otherwise staid SMS program that comes with these Treos. These features include:

• Speaking all the text in a SMS message
• Repeating the message as necessary, as many times as needed (aigh, this would drive me crazy!)
• Speak the name of the sender
• Adding a custom picture ID and custom filters for each sender
• A powerful and customizable shortcut database where commonly-used abbreviations like “ASAP” would be spoken as “as soon as possible”
• Intuitive user interface
• Useful for while driving or walking (well, I can read / type while walking — and I – ahem – shouldn’t be doing that while driving)

It sells for $9.95, although a trial version is available. I can imagine that this would be useful for (hearing!) road warriors as well as people who have low vision.