“Yeah, sure… Can you please text me your email?” said the girl next to me. She was talking on her mobile for about ten minutes during the SkyTrain ride and needed to wrap up just as we were heading into the tunnel following the Stadium station.

Why is it necessary to invoke multiple means of communication right in the middle of an active conversation?

Voice calls are great. They are real-time and carry a lot of information, in words and intonations. Yet, they are analogue and lack the link to the digital world. When we have to request a file or a URL it’s easier to turn to an all-digital medium like e-mail. Because of cost and usability matters, texting often acts as an intermediary between the mobile and the web. This multi-modal approach works - but it doesn’t have to be that difficult.

John had an excellent idea - record every call and convert its contents into text. There is some use to simply having a transcript of things you’ve said, but the interesting consequences arise from having a computer analyze the conversation in real-time:

1. When the mobile hears the word “file” and the contents description it can reasonably well establish what document is being discussed a-la OSX SpotLight (assuming a link to a storage cloud)
2. Names spoken in the call can be mapped to names from the address book with reasonable accuracy
3. Actions and dates are also quite clear in verbal exchanges (”send”, “tomorrow”, “spreadsheet”).

The beauty of it is, all the technology required is already there - someone simply has to put it all together. Us?

In other news, MobScure received the post of the week award at the current Carnival of the Mobilists (thank you!). Head to Symbiano-Tek for this week’s best mobile blogs from around the world.