Google and Twitter work together to make Egyptians heard

by Polly Becker, posted on 1 February, 2011 at 10:29 am, filed under Social Media, Web and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

As protesters prepare for a mass march in Cario today, Google is back doing good. It is working with Twitter and SayNow, a company it acquired last week, to make sure that the voices of Egyptians on the streets are heard around the world despite an internet crackdown.

Using SayNow Egyptians can simply leave a voicemail on an international number listed on Google’s blog, which are then instantly turned into tweets.

The service uses Google’s speech-to-text recognition service to automatically translate messages on a series of numbers sent out on Twitter using the hashtag #egypt.

The launch of the service comes as opposition groups again take to the streets after days of protests and interruption to internet and online services.

Bloomberg quoted the Internet Society saying that as much as 90% of Egypt’s internet networks were down as of late yesterday. Protesters are having to turn to old-fashioned dial-up connections to the net as an alternative. As many as 30 different dial-up services are now being offered to circumvent the shutdown by President Hosni Mubarak’s government.

The effort by Google will provide another opening on a day that looks set to be pivotal as one million are expected.

Here’s the full details  from Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow : “Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

“We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

“We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.”