TTS helping homeless

Google Pushes GrandCentral to Help the Homeless

Google announced that it is offering its GrandCentral service to homeless people as a means of helping them get their lives back in order. A good number of homeless Americans (those not suffering from mental illness) are just in need of assistance getting their lives back in order, a difficult prospect when a possible employer can’t even call you, because you don’t have a house to have a phone in.

Google is encouraging the homeless to use GrandCentral and enabling them to get into the sorta-private beta. Even without a computer or phone, the homeless person will be able to have a phone number that always works and never changes (as opposed to handing out payphone numbers) and receive voicemail they can listen to whenever they get to a phone. The GrandCentral number, with its local area codes and permanent status, won’t carry the stigma associated with pooled 800 numbers with temporary access codes.

It’s good of Google to see the potential in GrandCentral to help fix a few lives. The next step: Letting GrandCentral users receive email messages in their voicemail, so the homeless can hand out a Gmail address and listen to a text-to-speech system read them their emails over the phone.
(via DVICE)