Wednesday, July 24, 2013

New cell phone state

Caller ID is great--I can often identify who is calling by the ring tone. In some cases I ignore the call and settle for voice mail later; especially when driving or in a meeting.

My phone is either receiving or not receiving a call. Maybe it is busy, or off, or I just haven't answered it yet, but no information can reach me until I pick up.

Suppose I specified that for some phone number, I was willing to accept additional data to be communicated during the ring. I could turn this feature on when driving. (I tried a bluetooth headset but the battery ran down quickly.)

  1. This could be a simple flag that turned on a "whoop" to indicate that this is an emergency call (e.g. please pull over and take this call).
  2. It could be a text message that text-to-voice turns into an additional spoken message during the ring (e.g. "You left your passport on the table!").
  3. It could be a chunk of speech sent as data that gets appended to the ring tone.

This isn't something to turn on during a business meeting, and there are opportunities for mischief if somebody gets hold of your phone and resets permissions for you. And the police would probably want to be able to override preferences ("Please pull over now and wait in your car").

There are times it would be handy, and it doesn't seem as though it should be hard to implement.

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