A test drive of hands-free texting

So does my boss. What about you? It's texting while driving: the insanely attention-diverting practice of typing out messages on cellphones while barreling down the highway. A law against it in California is set to go into effect in July, but it applies only to drivers under the age of 18. Guess that leaves Britney Spears in the clear.

An abstinence campaign probably wouldn't have much of an effect either, given how common texting has become as a form of communication.

The most obvious solution, other than self-control, is hands-free texting.

Ford Motor Co. is getting into the game. It will offer a technology upgrade called Sync as an option for some 2008 cars. Among other functions, it can read aloud, via computer voice, incoming text messages. But Sync won't send messages, which makes for a one-sided conversation.

There are a few products on the market, and more to come, that enable you to send text messages without any pesky typing, directly from your phone.

Not all of them rely solely on technology. Some use human transcribers in India or elsewhere who listen to your spoken message (an impetus for keeping it clean) and then send it along as text.

Others employ voice-to-text technology.

Neither type is infallible. And none of the services tested for this article provided a complete solution.

Because the problem is relatively new, the remedies are in their early stages. Still, some showed promise.

Jott

The test message came out this way: "It actually turns my text to speech, which is kinda the idea if I was in the choir and doing this."

I was not in a choir, thank goodness for anyone who has heard me try to even hum a tune. The word I actually said, while testing Jott, was "car."

Someone, most likely offshore, listened to my test message and got the word wrong. In addition, the entire message was presented almost without periods in long, run-on sentences. But slang words, such as kinda, were spelled perfectly.

Maybe the transcriber was learning English from "Welcome Back, Kotter" reruns.

John Pollard, chief executive of Jott, acknowledged that mistakes would be made. But a transcriber is more reliable than currently available speech-to-text programs, he maintained.

"There is no way that speech technology, by itself, can be used over a cellphone in a wide variety of situations," Pollard said.