An early April Fool’s Day joke, or the real deal? You judge.
I was reading reports that General Motors is planning to offer Twitter capability for drivers who use the company’s OnStar security, communications, navigation and diagnostics system.
GM offers OnStar as a subscription service in the US and Canada for vehicles it sells in those markets that have the factory-installed OnStar equipment. The service currently has more than five million subscribers in North America (see the Wikipedia entry if you want detailed information about OnStar).
According to a GearLive post yesterday – this story is an exclusive, they say – Twitter integration is coming to OnStar which you would use in the same way as you use OnStar to make or receive a cellular phone call – hands free and voice activated.
While in your vehicle, you can use OnStar to submit and retrieve tweets (messages) via your Twitter account. Using OnStar’s Voice-Activated Hands-Free Calling system, and having your voice converted into text, you can provide updates which would appear in the “What are you doing?” section of your Twitter homepage. It is also possible to listen to a tweet that was sent to you by someone else after it has been converted into voice. You can send and receive tweets without having to type or read anything.
You’ve been able to do something similar for quite a while now with TwitterFone – call in your tweets from your mobile phone and the service converts your voice recording into text and then tweets your message. Your voice recording is also available.
I’ve used that service and it’s pretty neat.
It’s amazing the imagination at work from so many people with so many products and services that work with Twitter.
The OnStar deal, if it is real, is another indicator of how mainstream Twitter has now become.
Is it an April Fool’s Day joke or the real deal? GearLive says it’s the real deal.
If Twitter and OnStar isn’t, I’d say it’s only a matter of time before someone offers something like this, somewhere.
