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ParrotBot reads your GMail to you
I drive to work and wanted to check and sort through my email without looking at my screen (which is not only illegal in California but dangerous as all hell). I wrote a little phone-based service that lets you dial a number and have a robot read you your email. You can take some pretty basic actions like Ignore, Archive, or Star so that your email looks cleaner by the time you get to your desk. It's definitely still rough on the edges, but curious what the HN community thinks of it. Would you guys & gals use it?
- EvanK 15y agoVery interesting idea. Though, this seems like it would be much better suited as an Android/iOS/etc app to live on the phone itself.
- swah 15y agoPerhaps it still makes sense not to assume everyone on a car has internet access?
- yanda 15y agoThe reason I went with a phone number is that phone calls generally play well with cars (in-car bluetooth headsets, etc...) whereas audio for apps usually has a harder time connecting to in-car devices.
- davidradcliffe 15y agoCool idea. Works pretty well if the message has a text version but if the message only has an HTML version it doesn't try to read it.
- yanda 15y agoIt manages to read _some_ HTML emails but there are definitely still tons of rough edges. Turns out email parsing is not fun. :-)
- xtacy 15y agoI guess it should possible to run HTML emails through lynx (or some equivalent library) that just dumps the text? If the email's a picture, oh well.
- yanda 15y agoNot a bad idea though lynx doesn't do a great job parsing HTML emails either, unfortunately. Turns out it's an annoying problem irrespective of the email "client"
- r00fus 15y agoThis is awesome. Now if you could only do Google Reader or RSS I might find a use for all those "rollover minutes" in my account.
- r00fus 15y agoIf someone balks at the warning: "This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you deny access unless you trust the website.", and clicks [Deny], they will receive a really ugly trace dump.
- jordanroher 15y agoYou don't even have to do that much. Just click the Get Started button without typing in anything.
- alanh 15y agoGreat idea, BUT — Isn’t it true that it is fairly trivial for attackers to spoof the number they are calling “from”? If so, this could be a serious security weakness, couldn’t it?
- yanda 15y agoSpoofing the phone number is not very hard. That said, you'd still need the PIN to gain access to the email. A 4 digit pin is not the most secure thing around, but the combo of the phone number and the PIN seems reasonably safe. Thoughts?
- alanh 15y agoWasn’t aware of the PIN step. That does help. [You]† should definitely report failed attempts to log in, at least in an opt-in capacity. † Edited from “they”
- yanda 15y agoGood point. I will add it to the list of feature requests.
- alanh 15y agoThanks. I realized why I missed the bit about the PIN: 1. It is omitted from the steps in the main content area, and 2. Due to a design neurosis I have, I did not process the bit at the top that talks about the PIN being required because my brain fixated on the different icon styles (Logo: what I think of as SVG style; Gmail: well, Gmail; Phone: Silk-esque; PIN/shield: Vista/Win 7). I trust the vast majority of your visitors will be able to retain the information you presented instead of doing whatever my own mind does… Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. I think I’ll try it out!
- jberryman 15y agoA 4 digit pin isn't good enough if you care at all about thwarting serious attackers. Do a quick calculation of how long it would take an attacker with a script and 10 phone lines to get access. Maybe you could translate a longer password into the corresponding touchtones?
- sylvinus 15y agoWhen I read the title I believed an AR.Drone from Parrot (http://www.parrot.com/usa/ http://www.parrot.com/usa/) would fly to me and read my mail ;-) (They have an API I think so that may actually not be too far-fetched...)
- krupenin 15y agoVery cool. If you add "respond with a voice message", it can help spread the Parrot goodness :)