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New app tackling road deaths

Paula Gilbert
By Paula Gilbert, ITWeb telecoms editor.
Johannesburg, 15 Dec 2015
New app messageLOUD aims to eliminate distracted driving.
New app messageLOUD aims to eliminate distracted driving.

A new smartphone app, messageLOUD, aims to reduce traffic accidents by enabling drivers to have their texts and emails read aloud to them.

"Distracted driving has killed thousands and injures more than half a million people each year globally, and is responsible for billions of dollars in insurance claims. Our mission at messageLOUD is to eliminate accidents and deaths due to smartphone usage while driving," says Garin Toren, founder and CEO of messageLOUD.

The patent-pending messaging service's mission is to eliminate distracted driving with an eyes-free experience that enables you to automatically hear your messages out loud, and triage them by deleting or dismissing messages without looking at your phone.

messageLOUD is the brainchild of South African-born Toren, who was previously executive VP and COO of Striata and remains a shareholder in the electronic customer communications company.

Toren, who now lives in the United States, came up with the idea while driving to his house in the Hamptons, after feeling frustrated that he could not respond to a number of emails and SMSes during the two-hour trip, while remaining focused on driving.

He saw a gap in the market believing that there must be some sort of tech solution to solve his frustration. He admits his app is not the first of its kind but believes it is the most advanced and user friendly to be launched so far.

"There have been a couple of very immature attempts at this but no one has taken a proper commercial run at it and we are doing exactly that and have been working on it for over a year," he told ITWeb in an interview.

He says after extensive research into these "immature app attempts" for both iOS and Android he found that most were "riddled with technical difficulties, terrible user experience and quite surprisingly, the majority of them simply did not work".

He admits there are also some high end vehicles that now have built in systems to read your text messages, but believes none cater for email. In terms of smartphone capabilities he says Samsung's 'drive mode' only reads out texts not emails and the iPhone can only do this by asking Siri to do so.

"This requires looking at your phone and multiple clicks. Siri also only reads who the email is from and the subject lines, unless you have the actual email you want read open. I discovered that there was no way for her to read email and texts as they arrive and definitely no way to dismiss or delete emails."

"As of today there are few to no competitive products available" says Toren.

Global appeal

The app launched globally this week and uses Google's Text To Speech (TTS) engine to read out messages in around 17 languages. Toren says the app is available anywhere but the company will be focussing its efforts on the USA, Canada, the UK and South Africa to start.

"We are sincerely hoping for millions of users worldwide - distracted driving is a massive problem in every country," he says.

messageLOUD wants to eliminate accidents and deaths due to smartphone usage while driving, says founder Garin Toren.
messageLOUD wants to eliminate accidents and deaths due to smartphone usage while driving, says founder Garin Toren.

For now the app is only available for Android but there are plans to expand to iOS and wearables soon. There is a free 30-day trail after which you will pay R19.99 a month or R199.99 a year to use the app.

Toren says the app is marketed as a service and not a once-off purchase because of the cost of the team needed to continuously update the app to cater for various different devices as they evolve. The app also offers 24/7 support globally and is working on a number or updates and increased features going forward.

"The African market is very important to us and that is one of the reasons we have specialised local pricing so that you are not paying in dollars or pounds. We appreciate that South Africa is a unique market and one I know well."

At the moment the app only reads SMSs and emails from major email provider platforms, but Toren says they are planning to extend into WhatsApp, Facebook messenger and Skype messenger in the first quarter of 2016.

Toren told ITWeb that for now the app does not support any South African or other African languages because TTS does not currently have the software available to read them, but he hopes to expand into local languages in time.

The languages the app offers are: Cantonese, Dutch, English (India), English (United Kingdom), English (United States), French, German, Hindi, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (United States), Thai and Turkish.

There are also a lot of other plans in the pipeline for the app including the possible addition of a number of new voices. "If you want your emails read out by Arnold Schwarzenegger, that may be an option," according to Toren.

Don't text and drive

The app's makers say that South Africa has one of the highest road accident rates in the world and 25% of those accidents are caused by cell phone use while driving. He says people who email or text while driving are four times more likely to be in an accident and in the US there are 11 teenage deaths daily because of this.

"Data shows that a single instance of mobile phone usage represents an average of 52 seconds of distracted driving. At 60 kilometres per hour, this is equivalent to driving "blind" for one kilometre, and makes the driver four times more likely to have an accident," says Toren.

He says a great deal of the app's basics are based on what he found were considered the 'best practices' of industry bodies when it came to driving safely and using technology. His research found that listening is ok (e.g. radio and navigation) and touch is ok (indicators, lights, windshield-wipers, sound control, climate control, windows, etc). New research by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety cites activities like dialling, changing music or sending a text using voice commands as potentially unsafe mental distractions that can impact driving.

messageLOUD is designed on this principle and has no capabilities for voice to text to respond to messages because the creators deem this as too distracting. You can however customise an auto-response for incoming messages to show that you are driving.

"AAA's President and CEO Marshall Doney calls for developers to aim to reduce mental distractions by designing systems that are no more demanding than listening to the radio or an audiobook," according to Toren.

Toren admits that the best solution to this problem is obviously no phone use at all but points out that the majority of drivers check their phones constantly and says he is "as guilty as the rest of us".

How it works

Once you put the phone in drive mode it will automatically read out your incoming messages. Your phone's screen also becomes a touch screen and you only need to use four basic gestures to control the app, none of which require you to take your eyes off the road.

A double tap on the screen will dismiss a message and mark it as read. A single swipe down the screen will delete the message and a swipe up the screen will call the person back. A single tap to the screen pauses the message and another tap restarts it.

The app supports Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Hotmail and Yahoo. The app is also split-screen compatible for simultaneous use with other apps, like navigation or music. You can set up customised settings to prioritise some contacts and ignore others and tailor which messages you want read out loud.

While the app was created to be used while driving, Toren says there are a number of other scenarios where the app would be useful like when exercising. "I'd love to know who is texting or emailing me while I'm running, biking, paddling etc. and so messageLOUD was conceived to address this as well".

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