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ParrotBot reads your GMail to you (parrotbot.com)

47 points by yanda ↗ HN
I drive to work and wanted to check and sort through my email without looking at my screen (which is not only illegal in California but dangerous as all hell). I wrote a little phone-based service that lets you dial a number and have a robot read you your email. You can take some pretty basic actions like Ignore, Archive, or Star so that your email looks cleaner by the time you get to your desk. It's definitely still rough on the edges, but curious what the HN community thinks of it. Would you guys & gals use it?

23 comments

[ 11.0 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] thread
EvanK
Very interesting idea. Though, this seems like it would be much better suited as an Android/iOS/etc app to live on the phone itself.
swah
Perhaps it still makes sense not to assume everyone on a car has internet access?
yanda
The reason I went with a phone number is that phone calls generally play well with cars (in-car bluetooth headsets, etc...) whereas audio for apps usually has a harder time connecting to in-car devices.
davidradcliffe
Cool idea. Works pretty well if the message has a text version but if the message only has an HTML version it doesn't try to read it.
yanda
It manages to read _some_ HTML emails but there are definitely still tons of rough edges. Turns out email parsing is not fun. :-)
xtacy
I guess it should possible to run HTML emails through lynx (or some equivalent library) that just dumps the text?

If the email's a picture, oh well.

yanda
Not a bad idea though lynx doesn't do a great job parsing HTML emails either, unfortunately. Turns out it's an annoying problem irrespective of the email "client"
r00fus
This is awesome.

Now if you could only do Google Reader or RSS I might find a use for all those "rollover minutes" in my account.

auston
my question is... would you pay to have someone read your RSS to you while you're driving/running/working out/etc ?
yanda
That's a good question. I'm obviously curious about the answer as well. ;-)
r00fus
Yes, but how much would depend on quality.
r00fus
If someone balks at the warning: "This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you deny access unless you trust the website.", and clicks [Deny], they will receive a really ugly trace dump.
jordanroher
You don't even have to do that much. Just click the Get Started button without typing in anything.
yanda
Yes yes...there are bugs. :-)
alanh
I think I’m going to hold off on trying this after all, for security reasons. Seeing a stack trace/debug info is frightening because it’s not just a bug, it’s a configuration error that belies a certain lack of caution.
alanh
Great idea, BUT —

Isn’t it true that it is fairly trivial for attackers to spoof the number they are calling “from”? If so, this could be a serious security weakness, couldn’t it?

yanda
Spoofing the phone number is not very hard. That said, you'd still need the PIN to gain access to the email. A 4 digit pin is not the most secure thing around, but the combo of the phone number and the PIN seems reasonably safe. Thoughts?
alanh
Wasn’t aware of the PIN step. That does help. [You]† should definitely report failed attempts to log in, at least in an opt-in capacity.

† Edited from “they”

yanda
Good point. I will add it to the list of feature requests.
alanh
Thanks.

I realized why I missed the bit about the PIN:

1. It is omitted from the steps in the main content area, and

2. Due to a design neurosis I have, I did not process the bit at the top that talks about the PIN being required because my brain fixated on the different icon styles (Logo: what I think of as SVG style; Gmail: well, Gmail; Phone: Silk-esque; PIN/shield: Vista/Win 7). I trust the vast majority of your visitors will be able to retain the information you presented instead of doing whatever my own mind does…

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. I think I’ll try it out!

jberryman
A 4 digit pin isn't good enough if you care at all about thwarting serious attackers. Do a quick calculation of how long it would take an attacker with a script and 10 phone lines to get access.

Maybe you could translate a longer password into the corresponding touchtones?

sylvinus
When I read the title I believed an AR.Drone from Parrot (http://www.parrot.com/usa/) would fly to me and read my mail ;-)

(They have an API I think so that may actually not be too far-fetched...)

krupenin
Very cool. If you add "respond with a voice message", it can help spread the Parrot goodness :)