Google and Twitter Help Egyptian Voices

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Submitted by IQ4News on Tue, 01/02/2011 - 4:30pm

Internet giants, Google and Twitter, have teamed up to provide a speech-to-text service, which will allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages via voicemail.

This comes after the last internet service provider in Egypt, Noor Group, was cut off on Monday.

In the official Google blog, Ujwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow, and Abdel Karim Mardini, Google's product manager for the Middle East and north Africa said, “Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection”.

People wishing to use the service can call any of the following numbers:

+16504194196;

+390662207294;

+97316199855.

Users can also listen to the tweets by dialling these numbers.

There is no internet access required to use this service.

"We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time," wrote Ujwal and Abdel. "Our thoughts are with everyone there."

Why?

Many observers have questioned why the major internet service providers complied with the order to shut down their services. The four major providers, Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr, were the first to cease their services on Friday, leaving Noor Group, which only cut off its internet on Monday.

Although mobile phone services were restored on Saturday, text messaging services are still largely disrupted.