8 ms·

Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

373 points by ssclafani 16y ago

ptornroth 16y ago
A profoundly beautiful project, with profoundly beautiful results. Honestly, I really think there's something more permanent here. We ought to experience more world events with this degree of humanity, and lack of abstraction.
nicpottier 16y ago
Uhm.. isn't this what SMS is for? For one it is way cheaper for the callers, for two it innately enforces the Twitter character limit. Doing voice to text seems like a pretty roundabout way to do this, anybody have any clues? It's nice and all, but just seems like a solution looking for a problem.
- rayval 16y ago
  SMS was shut down at the same time.
dustyreagan 16y ago
Here's a very active Google Docs spreadsheet of @Speak2Tweet translations: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=tVDU006Wt97P_GkYYBmPOKQ&hl=en#gid=0 https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=tVDU006Wt9...
- jalammar 16y ago
  It stopped updating and allowing us to edit,any idea why?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jdp23 16y ago
kudos to Google and SayNow. good use of Twitter too!
wakeup 16y ago
Fucking useless! You really think Twitter is any better than any dictator...? Go make real software!
kalpeshjoshi 16y ago
This is an excellent idea, another medium to get the message, especially using older phone technology. I think the arabic speech recognition / txt translation is on it's way, we've come a long way with just character based text translations (i.e. mandarin, hindi, etc.). Another thought: it actually seems like the reverse strategy of the aftermath of the floods in Australia. Where services need to keep the phone lines open for rescue workers and orgs, so people could tweet their distress msgs and location to relief orgs using broadband access over 3g.
danteembermage 16y ago
This should significantly raise the economic cost to stifling speech in Egypt for the current regime (shutting down the phone system is probably significantly more disruptive to daily life that the internet there). Of course assuming locals manage to find out about it.
nathanb 16y ago
Interesting...in the old days, those phone numbers would go to the news desk of some major media corporation. The fact that (at least purportedly) Egyptians would consider getting their tidbits on Twitter--and the fact that Twitter scales better for this sort of thing than even the largest old-media institution--seems profound.
- blhack 16y ago
  I included this point on a "reasons it's already the future" list I made the other day (http://www.thingist.com/t/pageview/1674/ http://www.thingist.com/t/pageview/1674/). We all more-or-less own internationally syndicated newspapers now. Twitter is just the most common one.
p90x 16y ago
Seeing Americans companies take sides in the politics of foreign countries in such enthusiastic, carefree ways leaves me feeling very uneasy.
- moultano 16y ago
  Why?
  - hugh3 16y ago
    I'm not the OP, but I can see his point. Foreigners (not just Americans) taking sides in political disputes which they don't really understand might wind up helping the wrong side. Even if we just define "the wrong side" as "not the side they would have supported if they'd known more about the situation". Alternatively, even if they pick "the right side", they might wind up inadvertently helping the wrong side, since the right side can then say "Hey look, our enemies are being propped up by foreign interests!" Does this mean that foreigners can't take sides in political battles going on in other countries? No, but they should certainly be circumspect about it and do their research and not jump on a bandwagon just because it happens to smell nice.
    - RP_Joe 16y ago
      My thoughts exactly.
    - mkelly 16y ago
      I agree in principle, but in this case there's one side attempting to cut off all uncontrolled communication in and out of the country. It seems like an easy choice to side against their position on communication.
      - qq66 16y ago
        What if the revolution is successful but the current government is replaced with something far worse? Would you want to be part of a company that encouraged that?
ine 16y ago
I find it pretty cool that Google is willing to get actively involved in this. Some of the calls are even in English (ie. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0xILzlLdz09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...)
mvandemar 16y ago
Sad, a caller from an hour ago said they expect to have their phones disconnected also, which would render this useless, I think: http://twitter.com/speak2tweet/status/32197204739362816 http://twitter.com/speak2tweet/status/32197204739362816
austinB 16y ago
This is an absolutely great idea that strikes a blow to regimes who try to suppress uprisings by shutting down the internet. I can't say I am entirely optimistic about the direction Egypt will take if open elections are held, but their citizens have a right to have their voice heard. That being said, the 'nonchalantness' in this line regarding the SayNow acquisition was quite funny, "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." Well done Google.
sfphotoarts 16y ago
Thousands of years seemed to go by where uprisings didn't need social networking. The Babylonians didn't need Twitter when they rose up against the Assyrian Empire. The Inaros' didn't need Facebook when they confronted the Persians in Egypt (although they did have the help of the Greeks). Julius Caesar didn't tweet 'hey watch out Pompey' when he marched on Roma. Did the Sicilian Vespers need Twitter to alter the balance of European power under King Charles 1st. Maybe the great Peasant revolt in Medieval England would have been more successful had they used Twitter - although they did manage to keep the term poll tax out of the tax lexicon for 600 years. Then, of course, the period of history after Elizabeth 1st where pretty much everyone revolted at some point (even here in America) those all seemed to happen without need for social networking. I think humans are perfectly well equipped to revolt without social media. The currency of revolt has always been large numbers and big sticks. Maybe our (the HN community) sees the world through a lens that makes it impossible to accomplish what is an everyday occurrence (on the historical scale) without the internet.
- blhack 16y ago
  Our species existed for millions of years without cooking food. Our species existed for millions of years without any sort of sterilization. Thousands of wars have been fought without guns. Millions of businesses have been built, grown, and died without the use of the internet.
- ig1 16y ago
  Thousands of years seemed to go by where companies didn't need computers. It doesn't mean that computers add no value to companies.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  The Babylonians weren't up against armored tanks or teargas. To be certain: The Egyptians don't need social media to get their freedom. Just the same, communication is essential to any group activity, and social media is an advanced, instantaneous form of communication. It's a force multiplier for anyone seeking to maximize the effectiveness of the revolution. If the Egyptian security forces have access to modern tools, it's in the interest of the revolution to have modern tools as well. Even if social media only gets 10% more people to show up for a given demonstration, at the numbers we're seeing now, that's tens or hundreds of thousands of people. If communicating via the internet didn't help, why would Mubarak shut it down?
JonnieCache 16y ago
Some amazing stuff on there. This message brings a tear to my eye. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0xILzlLdz09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...
- randomtask 16y ago
  Yeah, that one got me too.
  - iacvlvs 16y ago
    I can't listen to it right now. Could someone please transcribe it?
    - psyklic 16y ago
      I strongly recommend listening for the full effect, but here is a rough translation for those who cannot. My apologies on likely misspelling the lady's name. The grammar tries to reflect her speed/pauses/etc: Hi, this is Monasef from Cairo. I just wanted to let the world know that we have been disconnected from our last point of communications through the Internet .. and there is a strong word going around that we will be again disconnected from mobile phone calls. So I wanted everyone to know, in case we don't get .. in case you don't get any feedback from what's happening tomorrow .. and I didn't want anyone to worry about us. They did this before ... the only difference is the last time when they did this I was completely freaked out I was so scared they are going to shoot us all and nobody would know about it. This time, I am not scared at all. I see that this .. like I wanna tell them bring it on! - we are excited we are happy we are going to be at Tahrir Square tomorrow, we are going to be huge and we are going to do our march and do our protest .. and Mubarak is going -- out -- <cry of relief/excitement> Be with us! byebye
      - Mafana0 16y ago
        You are a gentleman and a scholar... The name of the lady is Mona Saif, who sent another tweet in Arabic (native speaker here): http://bit.ly/dTj11s http://bit.ly/dTj11s
dholowiski 16y ago
Very cool. I assumed it would be filled up with Spam right away, but it's not - they must be doing some kind of filtering to make sure only Egyptian callers can leave a message. Most of the messages are not in english (duh) but here are a couple english messages. I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0xILzlLdz09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0... http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=ajRkanRVekNqSGdwZWw4ZXorRFRmQT09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=ajRkanRVekNqSGdwZWw4ZX... http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=dkxLMm1KTER2cG5jWkd2Z2NzbGxZUT09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=dkxLMm1KTER2cG5jWkd2Z2... http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=b1FveVRBQ2tyRlpWNjFMamJmRVZtUT09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=b1FveVRBQ2tyRlpWNjFMam...
- Timothee 16y ago
  I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too. I'd think the problem is that you're piling up two technologies known for being very approximate and the results would be likely to be pretty far off to the original meaning. Which is especially sensitive for the current situation.
- ars 16y ago
  "I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too." It's because speech recognition does not exist for Egyptian Arabic. There are some research programs, but no actual completed products. This may be surprising to some, but speech recognition is only available in a small number of languages. Mainly European languages plus Chinese. There is nothing preventing speech recognition in other languages, it's just no one has done it.
  - randomtask 16y ago
    The language Egyptians speak is Arabic. Voice recognition software for that language does exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAKHR_Software_Company#Speech_Recognition_.28ASR.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAKHR_Software_Company#Speech_R...
mvandemar 16y ago
They just shut off the cell networks too: http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5962180-egypt-shutting-off-cell-networks-again http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5962180-egyp...
- dmvaldman 16y ago
  that's very sad. the service still works for landline phones, which are still operational for now.
- goldins 16y ago
  The live stream of Al Jazeera (youtube link on here) also mentioned that trains have been stopped.
_sebkom 16y ago
Isn't this very different to the way twitter works? I follow this account and get links that I have to click on and then click on the "play" button again in order to listen to some(or any)one's broken english?
JonnieCache 16y ago
Telecomix are working on their own system - they are taking faxes which they will then post. Unfortunately they do not have the resources to set up on the trunk in egypt like google so its an international call to germany. http://interfax.werebuild.eu/2011/01/31/fax-to-interfax-for-egypt/ http://interfax.werebuild.eu/2011/01/31/fax-to-interfax-for-...
yters 16y ago
Hopefully the result of the revolution gets them a better government, unlike pretty much every other revolution in history (America is a special case).
- tastybites 16y ago
  So what you're saying is "pretty much every" current government is the worst it's ever been? Come on.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    No, what yters is saying is that governments installed via revolutions tend to be worse than the ones that they replaced. Governments can and often do get better over time, but through gradual change rather than violent revolution. On the other hand sometimes revolutions do produce better governments. I think Indonesia kicking out the Soehartos and installing a fairly reasonable democracy is a good recent example. I'm not sure the American Revolution counts as a revolution at all -- it was more of an independence movement, and I think these tend to have a better record than true revolutions.
ammmir 16y ago
woah, i just posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163688 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163688 about my startup camp experience and doing something similar but in reverse: calling you for new tweets. doing my app with the google speech recognition API would be awesome!
citricsquid 16y ago
This raises a thought for me with regards to my own Twitter usage. I find this a great idea and would like to follow it, but the high level of tweets this produces will saturate my stream and block out the other people I'm also interested in (I follow ~30 people and keep the people I follow limited to those I am truly interested in) so I wonder, could Twitter eventually have some sort of "Watch" feature? Display would be the same style as trending (maybe next to it and re-position the suggested users) where each "watched" user is displayed with a running tally of total tweets and next to that the # of new tweets since I last visited their page? I guess lists would be a temporary solution, but even they get saturated easily. completely off topic, but maybe some others share the same desire, I figure this is a good topic to use as an example :-)
- ZoFreX 16y ago
  This is something I really like about Tweetdeck. You could add the Egypt twitter feed as a "column", which would be a list of tweets alongside your main feed, so you can more easily follow both. If you're on the move a lot, you can sync your columns across computers / phones, but that does involve trusting them with some of your account details.
InfinityX0 16y ago
This Egyptian situation puts new perspective on Malcolm Gladwell's popular article, "The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted". I'm not sure how it applies (if at all) - but it's interesting that the revolution comes from the fact that people really can't tweet (or use the internet, more importantly). Would love to hear 2nd thoughts from people here RE: that article. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_...
- itistoday 16y ago
  I think the events in Tunisia and Egypt show just how wrong that perspective is. Twitter and social media in general are in their infancy and yet already are having such a massive impact on social change around the world. The ability to communicate thoughts, events, instantaneously, as they happen, and from the people actively involved in those events around the world, is unprecedented in human history. The revolution has been tweeted. It does not depend solely on twitter and the like, but these are not tools to be underestimated. Just compare the quality of the content you're getting by following people actively engaged in the revolution on twitter, with what you see on CNN. This is revolutionary.
  - itistoday 16y ago
    Btw, I should add an anecdotal example of what's possible. Near the start of the uprising, parts of the protest pamphlet were leaked online (http://j.mp/hZf7uY http://j.mp/hZf7uY) before the protest was set to take place. The pamphlet explicitly requested secrecy so that the details of the protest would not get into the hands of the government. I was lying in bed in San Francisco, watching as news of this broke out on my iPhone twitter stream. Many people, myself included, were able to convince the author of the piece to delete his tweet with the link to the post, and while the post itself wasn't taken down, I wasn't able to find it from the publication's front page, and the post itself was edited to include a link to a video submitted by a twitter user of a man being shot and killed by the Egyptian police. And that's just a small incident I happened to stumble across. I think that illustrates how profoundly the world has changed, where individuals, anywhere on the planet, can influence people and events in ways that can have significant consequences. All that, through a few tweets.
halo 16y ago
YouTube are now offering a live stream of Al Jazeera (scroll half-way down the page): http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish
elliottcarlson 16y ago
I am surprised no one is concerned about this in regards to the safety of the callers. The government is obviously taking all steps in silencing in or outbound communication - with the obvious control structure in place over communications, it would seem feasible for the government to trace calls to these specific numbers (even if they block them) and punish people who do so. Don't get me wrong, I want to know what is going on there, and anyone willing to leak that information out is doing something heroic imho - but the safety of these individuals could be in serious threat - or maybe I am just overly paranoid...
- gbhn 16y ago
  Of course. Protests and revolutions are dangerous business. It makes me thoughtful about whether I'd be brave enough to take advantage of these kinds of tools should the necessity arise.
  - corin_ 16y ago
    I'd rather take my chances of being one of hundreds (or thousands) of people speaking out on twitter than being one of hundreds of thousands marching on the streets against tanks and men with guns. Regardless, personally I'd do both. While it's nowhere near comparable to the situation in Egypt, witnessing police brutality in English demonstrations (yes, FAR FAR FAR less severe than in Egypt, but still... one of my earliest memories was being on a political demonstration at age four in which troops of policemen on horses were charging at us with riot police behind) hasn't stopped me. And, where I in the Egyptians' situation, it wouldn't stop my then, either. The danger is far worse, but so the need for action is also far greater.
    - Unseelie 16y ago
      Last I heard, the people with tanks were fans of the revolution...
  - csomar 16y ago
    I'm from Tunisia and in the Tunisian revolution When I asked some of my friends if they don't fear being caught for sharing sensitive materials and photos, they told me: Really? The government can know what you are doing on Facebook? May be these were just my friends... But here is a more amusing story: A boy has a group in Facebook and shared some photos of the interior minister. He left his information out. The cops caught him and brought him to the ministry and abused him. When he was kicked out of the ministry, he met with a TV reporter and told his story and in the end he said that he's going to start a page where he'll put all of the government abuses and funny pictures about the government. The story made my day.
tobych 16y ago
Couldn't translations be crowdsourced? I've asked an Egyptian friend living in the UK if he could offer translations (transcripts) of some of these.
- nimda 16y ago
  http://egypt.alive.in http://egypt.alive.in

373 points by ssclafani 16y ago

A profoundly beautiful project, with profoundly beautiful results. Honestly, I really think there's something more permanent here. We ought to experience more world events with this degree of humanity, and lack of abstraction.

nicpottier 16y ago

Uhm.. isn't this what SMS is for? For one it is way cheaper for the callers, for two it innately enforces the Twitter character limit. Doing voice to text seems like a pretty roundabout way to do this, anybody have any clues? It's nice and all, but just seems like a solution looking for a problem.

rayval 16y ago
SMS was shut down at the same time.

dustyreagan 16y ago

Here's a very active Google Docs spreadsheet of @Speak2Tweet translations: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=tVDU006Wt97P_GkYYBmPOKQ&hl=en#gid=0 https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=tVDU006Wt9...

jalammar 16y ago
It stopped updating and allowing us to edit,any idea why?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jdp23 16y ago

kudos to Google and SayNow. good use of Twitter too!

wakeup 16y ago

Fucking useless! You really think Twitter is any better than any dictator...? Go make real software!

kalpeshjoshi 16y ago

This is an excellent idea, another medium to get the message, especially using older phone technology. I think the arabic speech recognition / txt translation is on it's way, we've come a long way with just character based text translations (i.e. mandarin, hindi, etc.). Another thought: it actually seems like the reverse strategy of the aftermath of the floods in Australia. Where services need to keep the phone lines open for rescue workers and orgs, so people could tweet their distress msgs and location to relief orgs using broadband access over 3g.

danteembermage 16y ago

This should significantly raise the economic cost to stifling speech in Egypt for the current regime (shutting down the phone system is probably significantly more disruptive to daily life that the internet there). Of course assuming locals manage to find out about it.

nathanb 16y ago

Interesting...in the old days, those phone numbers would go to the news desk of some major media corporation. The fact that (at least purportedly) Egyptians would consider getting their tidbits on Twitter--and the fact that Twitter scales better for this sort of thing than even the largest old-media institution--seems profound.

blhack 16y ago
I included this point on a "reasons it's already the future" list I made the other day (http://www.thingist.com/t/pageview/1674/ http://www.thingist.com/t/pageview/1674/). We all more-or-less own internationally syndicated newspapers now. Twitter is just the most common one.

p90x 16y ago

Seeing Americans companies take sides in the politics of foreign countries in such enthusiastic, carefree ways leaves me feeling very uneasy.

moultano 16y ago
Why?
- hugh3 16y ago
  I'm not the OP, but I can see his point. Foreigners (not just Americans) taking sides in political disputes which they don't really understand might wind up helping the wrong side. Even if we just define "the wrong side" as "not the side they would have supported if they'd known more about the situation". Alternatively, even if they pick "the right side", they might wind up inadvertently helping the wrong side, since the right side can then say "Hey look, our enemies are being propped up by foreign interests!" Does this mean that foreigners can't take sides in political battles going on in other countries? No, but they should certainly be circumspect about it and do their research and not jump on a bandwagon just because it happens to smell nice.
  - RP_Joe 16y ago
    My thoughts exactly.
  - mkelly 16y ago
    I agree in principle, but in this case there's one side attempting to cut off all uncontrolled communication in and out of the country. It seems like an easy choice to side against their position on communication.
    - qq66 16y ago
      What if the revolution is successful but the current government is replaced with something far worse? Would you want to be part of a company that encouraged that?

ine 16y ago

I find it pretty cool that Google is willing to get actively involved in this. Some of the calls are even in English (ie. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0xILzlLdz09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...)

mvandemar 16y ago

Sad, a caller from an hour ago said they expect to have their phones disconnected also, which would render this useless, I think: http://twitter.com/speak2tweet/status/32197204739362816 http://twitter.com/speak2tweet/status/32197204739362816

austinB 16y ago

This is an absolutely great idea that strikes a blow to regimes who try to suppress uprisings by shutting down the internet. I can't say I am entirely optimistic about the direction Egypt will take if open elections are held, but their citizens have a right to have their voice heard. That being said, the 'nonchalantness' in this line regarding the SayNow acquisition was quite funny, "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." Well done Google.

sfphotoarts 16y ago

Thousands of years seemed to go by where uprisings didn't need social networking. The Babylonians didn't need Twitter when they rose up against the Assyrian Empire. The Inaros' didn't need Facebook when they confronted the Persians in Egypt (although they did have the help of the Greeks). Julius Caesar didn't tweet 'hey watch out Pompey' when he marched on Roma. Did the Sicilian Vespers need Twitter to alter the balance of European power under King Charles 1st. Maybe the great Peasant revolt in Medieval England would have been more successful had they used Twitter - although they did manage to keep the term poll tax out of the tax lexicon for 600 years. Then, of course, the period of history after Elizabeth 1st where pretty much everyone revolted at some point (even here in America) those all seemed to happen without need for social networking. I think humans are perfectly well equipped to revolt without social media. The currency of revolt has always been large numbers and big sticks. Maybe our (the HN community) sees the world through a lens that makes it impossible to accomplish what is an everyday occurrence (on the historical scale) without the internet.

blhack 16y ago
Our species existed for millions of years without cooking food. Our species existed for millions of years without any sort of sterilization. Thousands of wars have been fought without guns. Millions of businesses have been built, grown, and died without the use of the internet.
ig1 16y ago
Thousands of years seemed to go by where companies didn't need computers. It doesn't mean that computers add no value to companies.
danilocampos 16y ago
The Babylonians weren't up against armored tanks or teargas. To be certain: The Egyptians don't need social media to get their freedom. Just the same, communication is essential to any group activity, and social media is an advanced, instantaneous form of communication. It's a force multiplier for anyone seeking to maximize the effectiveness of the revolution. If the Egyptian security forces have access to modern tools, it's in the interest of the revolution to have modern tools as well. Even if social media only gets 10% more people to show up for a given demonstration, at the numbers we're seeing now, that's tens or hundreds of thousands of people. If communicating via the internet didn't help, why would Mubarak shut it down?

JonnieCache 16y ago

Some amazing stuff on there. This message brings a tear to my eye. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0xILzlLdz09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...

randomtask 16y ago
Yeah, that one got me too.
- iacvlvs 16y ago
  I can't listen to it right now. Could someone please transcribe it?
  - psyklic 16y ago
    I strongly recommend listening for the full effect, but here is a rough translation for those who cannot. My apologies on likely misspelling the lady's name. The grammar tries to reflect her speed/pauses/etc: Hi, this is Monasef from Cairo. I just wanted to let the world know that we have been disconnected from our last point of communications through the Internet .. and there is a strong word going around that we will be again disconnected from mobile phone calls. So I wanted everyone to know, in case we don't get .. in case you don't get any feedback from what's happening tomorrow .. and I didn't want anyone to worry about us. They did this before ... the only difference is the last time when they did this I was completely freaked out I was so scared they are going to shoot us all and nobody would know about it. This time, I am not scared at all. I see that this .. like I wanna tell them bring it on! - we are excited we are happy we are going to be at Tahrir Square tomorrow, we are going to be huge and we are going to do our march and do our protest .. and Mubarak is going -- out -- <cry of relief/excitement> Be with us! byebye
    - Mafana0 16y ago
      You are a gentleman and a scholar... The name of the lady is Mona Saif, who sent another tweet in Arabic (native speaker here): http://bit.ly/dTj11s http://bit.ly/dTj11s

dholowiski 16y ago

Very cool. I assumed it would be filled up with Spam right away, but it's not - they must be doing some kind of filtering to make sure only Egyptian callers can leave a message. Most of the messages are not in english (duh) but here are a couple english messages. I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0xILzlLdz09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0... http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=ajRkanRVekNqSGdwZWw4ZXorRFRmQT09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=ajRkanRVekNqSGdwZWw4ZX... http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=dkxLMm1KTER2cG5jWkd2Z2NzbGxZUT09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=dkxLMm1KTER2cG5jWkd2Z2... http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=b1FveVRBQ2tyRlpWNjFMamJmRVZtUT09 http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=b1FveVRBQ2tyRlpWNjFMam...

Timothee 16y ago
I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too. I'd think the problem is that you're piling up two technologies known for being very approximate and the results would be likely to be pretty far off to the original meaning. Which is especially sensitive for the current situation.
ars 16y ago
"I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too." It's because speech recognition does not exist for Egyptian Arabic. There are some research programs, but no actual completed products. This may be surprising to some, but speech recognition is only available in a small number of languages. Mainly European languages plus Chinese. There is nothing preventing speech recognition in other languages, it's just no one has done it.
- randomtask 16y ago
  The language Egyptians speak is Arabic. Voice recognition software for that language does exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAKHR_Software_Company#Speech_Recognition_.28ASR.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAKHR_Software_Company#Speech_R...

mvandemar 16y ago

They just shut off the cell networks too: http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5962180-egypt-shutting-off-cell-networks-again http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5962180-egyp...

dmvaldman 16y ago
that's very sad. the service still works for landline phones, which are still operational for now.
goldins 16y ago
The live stream of Al Jazeera (youtube link on here) also mentioned that trains have been stopped.

_sebkom 16y ago

Isn't this very different to the way twitter works? I follow this account and get links that I have to click on and then click on the "play" button again in order to listen to some(or any)one's broken english?

JonnieCache 16y ago

Telecomix are working on their own system - they are taking faxes which they will then post. Unfortunately they do not have the resources to set up on the trunk in egypt like google so its an international call to germany. http://interfax.werebuild.eu/2011/01/31/fax-to-interfax-for-egypt/ http://interfax.werebuild.eu/2011/01/31/fax-to-interfax-for-...

yters 16y ago

Hopefully the result of the revolution gets them a better government, unlike pretty much every other revolution in history (America is a special case).

tastybites 16y ago
So what you're saying is "pretty much every" current government is the worst it's ever been? Come on.
- hugh3 16y ago
  No, what yters is saying is that governments installed via revolutions tend to be worse than the ones that they replaced. Governments can and often do get better over time, but through gradual change rather than violent revolution. On the other hand sometimes revolutions do produce better governments. I think Indonesia kicking out the Soehartos and installing a fairly reasonable democracy is a good recent example. I'm not sure the American Revolution counts as a revolution at all -- it was more of an independence movement, and I think these tend to have a better record than true revolutions.

ammmir 16y ago

woah, i just posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163688 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163688 about my startup camp experience and doing something similar but in reverse: calling you for new tweets. doing my app with the google speech recognition API would be awesome!

citricsquid 16y ago

This raises a thought for me with regards to my own Twitter usage. I find this a great idea and would like to follow it, but the high level of tweets this produces will saturate my stream and block out the other people I'm also interested in (I follow ~30 people and keep the people I follow limited to those I am truly interested in) so I wonder, could Twitter eventually have some sort of "Watch" feature? Display would be the same style as trending (maybe next to it and re-position the suggested users) where each "watched" user is displayed with a running tally of total tweets and next to that the # of new tweets since I last visited their page? I guess lists would be a temporary solution, but even they get saturated easily. completely off topic, but maybe some others share the same desire, I figure this is a good topic to use as an example :-)

ZoFreX 16y ago
This is something I really like about Tweetdeck. You could add the Egypt twitter feed as a "column", which would be a list of tweets alongside your main feed, so you can more easily follow both. If you're on the move a lot, you can sync your columns across computers / phones, but that does involve trusting them with some of your account details.

InfinityX0 16y ago

This Egyptian situation puts new perspective on Malcolm Gladwell's popular article, "The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted". I'm not sure how it applies (if at all) - but it's interesting that the revolution comes from the fact that people really can't tweet (or use the internet, more importantly). Would love to hear 2nd thoughts from people here RE: that article. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_...

itistoday 16y ago
I think the events in Tunisia and Egypt show just how wrong that perspective is. Twitter and social media in general are in their infancy and yet already are having such a massive impact on social change around the world. The ability to communicate thoughts, events, instantaneously, as they happen, and from the people actively involved in those events around the world, is unprecedented in human history. The revolution has been tweeted. It does not depend solely on twitter and the like, but these are not tools to be underestimated. Just compare the quality of the content you're getting by following people actively engaged in the revolution on twitter, with what you see on CNN. This is revolutionary.
- itistoday 16y ago
  Btw, I should add an anecdotal example of what's possible. Near the start of the uprising, parts of the protest pamphlet were leaked online (http://j.mp/hZf7uY http://j.mp/hZf7uY) before the protest was set to take place. The pamphlet explicitly requested secrecy so that the details of the protest would not get into the hands of the government. I was lying in bed in San Francisco, watching as news of this broke out on my iPhone twitter stream. Many people, myself included, were able to convince the author of the piece to delete his tweet with the link to the post, and while the post itself wasn't taken down, I wasn't able to find it from the publication's front page, and the post itself was edited to include a link to a video submitted by a twitter user of a man being shot and killed by the Egyptian police. And that's just a small incident I happened to stumble across. I think that illustrates how profoundly the world has changed, where individuals, anywhere on the planet, can influence people and events in ways that can have significant consequences. All that, through a few tweets.

halo 16y ago

YouTube are now offering a live stream of Al Jazeera (scroll half-way down the page): http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish

elliottcarlson 16y ago

I am surprised no one is concerned about this in regards to the safety of the callers. The government is obviously taking all steps in silencing in or outbound communication - with the obvious control structure in place over communications, it would seem feasible for the government to trace calls to these specific numbers (even if they block them) and punish people who do so. Don't get me wrong, I want to know what is going on there, and anyone willing to leak that information out is doing something heroic imho - but the safety of these individuals could be in serious threat - or maybe I am just overly paranoid...

gbhn 16y ago
Of course. Protests and revolutions are dangerous business. It makes me thoughtful about whether I'd be brave enough to take advantage of these kinds of tools should the necessity arise.
- corin_ 16y ago
  I'd rather take my chances of being one of hundreds (or thousands) of people speaking out on twitter than being one of hundreds of thousands marching on the streets against tanks and men with guns. Regardless, personally I'd do both. While it's nowhere near comparable to the situation in Egypt, witnessing police brutality in English demonstrations (yes, FAR FAR FAR less severe than in Egypt, but still... one of my earliest memories was being on a political demonstration at age four in which troops of policemen on horses were charging at us with riot police behind) hasn't stopped me. And, where I in the Egyptians' situation, it wouldn't stop my then, either. The danger is far worse, but so the need for action is also far greater.
  - Unseelie 16y ago
    Last I heard, the people with tanks were fans of the revolution...
- csomar 16y ago
  I'm from Tunisia and in the Tunisian revolution When I asked some of my friends if they don't fear being caught for sharing sensitive materials and photos, they told me: Really? The government can know what you are doing on Facebook? May be these were just my friends... But here is a more amusing story: A boy has a group in Facebook and shared some photos of the interior minister. He left his information out. The cops caught him and brought him to the ministry and abused him. When he was kicked out of the ministry, he met with a TV reporter and told his story and in the end he said that he's going to start a page where he'll put all of the government abuses and funny pictures about the government. The story made my day.

tobych 16y ago

Couldn't translations be crowdsourced? I've asked an Egyptian friend living in the UK if he could offer translations (transcripts) of some of these.

nimda 16y ago
http://egypt.alive.in http://egypt.alive.in