Your Car Is Reading Your Email

mjamil writes "The NYT is running an article about yet another case mod for your auto. This one, manufactured by a company called CarBot, lets you check mail wirelessly, and reads it to you, amongst other things. Amusing sidelines: note the /. reference in the images in the article, and check the fully featured CarBot Web site." Update: 09/10 00:29 GMT by H : This guy has also written "Mastering Internet Video: A Guide to Streaming and On-Demand Video".

Comments

Disconnect!

[calypso15]

For the love of god people, disconnect once in a while. I'm all about tech, I do it for a living, but I'm still able to stand being away from my email, cell-phone, and CS long enough to drive from work to home. Heck, I've even been known to enjoy a vacation now and then.

I mean, I know something like this might be more for show than anything. "Oh yeah? Well I can check my email in my CAR sucka!" But, it's just a tad ridiculous.

Email is not meant to be real-time

[FunWithHeadlines]

There has been a disconnect occurring with regard to email in recent years. With the proliferation of Blackberry type devices, and the ever-present need of middle managers to feel important, email has been turned into a real-time form of communication. "Hey, I just sent you an email, didya get it?" "Hey, why haven't you answered my email yet?"

This is all wrong. Email is designed specifically to be the form of communication that lets you control when you read it. It's designed around you, not you around it. If you need to reach somebody immediately, use the phone -- that's what it's for.

So having your car read you email is really only useful for a tiny subset of the population. For the rest it's just another way to distract yourself from your own thoughts while driving, or a way to make yourself feel important, or a way to harass your underlings at work ("Jenkins, I just got your email, and that's not at all the way I wanted you to proceed on that project!").

OnStar does this already

[sjf]

It's fine if you don't get much email, but for real world use, speech synthesis and voice recognition are an useless interface for email.

-S

Not Impressed

[hotspotbloc]

I'm sorry, I'm not. For $1450.00USD you get a VIA Epia-M motherboard, 256M RAM, 20G HD, 802.11g adapter and a GPS receiver. Kinda pricey. Buy the screen from them and add $420USD. IMO it's a nice DIY project but not a very good finished product.

The other complaint is with using MS WinXP Home. While XP is fine on a system with a standard keyboard and mouse it's hardly the best interface for a car. At least go with XP Pro so you can RDP into it for updates, repairs, etc.. This really calls for a semi customized OS and GUI (GNU/Linux or *BSD and X) with a tightly integrated voice control system. I don't want mess with a trackpad while driving.

I think a well crafted "car pc" would be nice and would sell. The CarBot, while nice and on par with some other DIY car computers it's nothing special.