Emails for small screens

This is wild. Motorola has come up with an answer to reading long emails on a cellphone or PDA with a small screen – software that automatically creates a synopsis of the long text, reports New Scientist.

"The new summarising software first discards sentences that are less than 5 words or more than 50. Then it looks for sentences containing words that frequently crop up in the text, or which the owner has added to a preference list.

Finally it sifts sentences which contain telltale words and phrases like “all in all”, “so to sum up” and “for example”. The few remaining sentences that fit all the criteria are pulled from the long message, stitched together and shown on screen.

But one risk if the system doesn't perform as people expect is that important messages could be deleted without being fully read. “By the way, you're fired,” might slip through the net, for example".

'Emails abridged' patent (pdf)

[From New Scientist's Column Invention, by Barry Fox, who trawls the world's weird and wonderful patent applications, digging out the most exciting, intriguing and even terrifying new ideas.]

emily | 4:34 PM | Technology |
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