What everyone is really waiting for is when the Microsoft research voice changer is finally production ready and there will be a service to call whoever you want(parents/significant other) and just pretend to be interested in what they tell you. If scheduling comes up pretend to need to sync the calendar and if anything really hard surfaces feign a work call/ cell phone trouble. People will feels much more loved and suddenly nobody will get enough of your favorite stories. As not to denigrate anyone I will provide examples of these calls made to myself. I can already picture how good it would work on me.
Yes nasmorn, Tell me more about how increasing your weekly running mileage has made you feel sluggish. So you are using soy yogurt in your shakes now, how interesting.
This reminded of the movie "Her"(2013) where the actor worked at a company with a similar use case. The difference being they wrote the letter for you (by dictating it to the computer) and then mailed it to the person. Wish they could do that!!
Reminds me of the movie "Her". Not sure I would use this but its a fun idea to experiment with.
I don't understand one thing. The customers know that companies are here just to make money. Then why do they think the letter is coming from the heart? Why don't they think it is some marketing guy's ploy to extract little more value/money?
Reminds me of stories about "letter writers" sitting outside post offices in rural India. Only difference is that some customers couldn't write and some couldn't even read. One feature you guys can pull from that is allow users to provide a gist of what needs to be in the message and you guys come up with actual message. Some people like me lack the skill of coming up with beautiful words ;)
This is neat! I'm not sure I have a real use for it - but if it was cheaper I'd use it a few times just for fun.
I wonder if they would send me a letter of a long, encoded string? Imagine ~300 characters of hand written hex encoded bytes, framed on your wall. .. man, I kind of want that.
The question is, would they write that?
This is ... so creepy. Humans as a Service, basically.
So is the custom handwriter an AxiDraw Pen Plotter?
Could Amazon's mechanical turk be used for this?
reminds me of violet evergrand
I can understand this from a business point of view but not from a personal one. I can just imagine sending the letter to someone who is dear to you and have them say how precious it was and how beautiful the handwriting was only to tell them that you didn't actually write it, or mail it. I.e. the whole value of a personally written letter comes from the fact that you yourself wrote it and sent it. Otherwise you might as well emailed it
Maybe some people with bad handwriting might find such service useful, or other reasons (what dugluak mentions is also a possibility; another possibility may be if you do not want to get all of the envelopes and stuff yourself). Sometimes people used to hire scribes to write stuff, so if that is what you want, then this service could do such thing, although it seem less being needing these days. Still, if anyone wants this service, now you have it; just because I don't like it doesn't mean that it is no good for anyone else either.
However, I think I do not need this; if I want a handwritten letter (for various reasons, including I am composing it while not at the computer, to include hand-written diagrams, or because I have the postal address to send it to, etc), I will do it by myself (I will still generally type the address on the envelope with a typewriter, though). If I wanted a copy of text from a computer I would probably use the printer (except that it seems to sometimes doesn't work on my computer, but sometimes it does work).