ParrotBot reads your GMail to you

yanda · 2011-04-28T21:14:11.000Z

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?

r00fus 15 years ago |

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 15 years ago | |

You don't even have to do that much. Just click the Get Started button without typing in anything.

yanda 15 years ago | | |

Yes yes...there are bugs. :-)

alanh 15 years ago | | |

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.

EvanK 15 years ago |

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 15 years ago | |

Perhaps it still makes sense not to assume everyone on a car has internet access?

yanda 15 years ago | | |

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.

r00fus 15 years ago |

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 15 years ago | |

my question is... would you pay to have someone read your RSS to you while you're driving/running/working out/etc ?

yanda 15 years ago | | |

That's a good question. I'm obviously curious about the answer as well. ;-)

r00fus 15 years ago | | |

Yes, but how much would depend on quality.

sylvinus 15 years ago |

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...)

alanh 15 years ago |

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 15 years ago | |

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 15 years ago | | |

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 15 years ago | | |

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

alanh 15 years ago | | |

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 15 years ago | | |

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?

davidradcliffe 15 years ago |

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 15 years ago | |

It manages to read _some_ HTML emails but there are definitely still tons of rough edges. Turns out email parsing is not fun. :-)

xtacy 15 years ago | | |

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 15 years ago | | |

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"

krupenin 15 years ago |

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