Good Idea! Now find a better one.

You’re in traffic. Maybe on the highway, maybe negotiating the traffic lights in the city. You’re using your hands to steer, your feet to regulate the go juice, your eyes and ears to monitor the situation. You’re busy. But…you need to check your email. Now whether or not you actually need to check your email while driving is up for debate, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.

So what do you do? Use your pda/phone? That requires your hands and your eyes. Your laptop? That needs your hands, your eyes, and your lap.

Enter iLane. We ran across it on Autoblog, iLane bills themselves as the first hands-and-eyes free email solution for driving. From the iLane website:

iLane™ integrates seamlessly with your car’s audio system. So as new messages arrive on your handheld device, iLane™ notifies notifies you immediately, then reads a summary aloud. Using voice commands you can then listen to the entire message; compose a reply; forward an attachment, and more.

No doubt there are a lot of on-the-go salesman out there with a lot of driving to do and a lot of people to communicate with.

Driving puts a lot of constraints on what you can do while behind the wheel and iLane is attempting to work within those constraints. But someone is going to need to really reorient this problem to come up with a “great” solution.

Given the choice, would most people prefer to read their email or listen to someone else, possibly a computer, read to them? Is it practical to have long emails read to you? Can you process all the information? Would it be more convenient to have short emails read to you while you do something else, like driving?

Given the choice, do people prefer to use a mouse, keyboard or phone keypad to enter messages, or speak to a computer and let it transcribe it? Is it easier to edit a message with a keyboard or your voice?

Now, iLane isn’t going for mass market adoption here, but even for the market segment that uses this, how great an idea is it?

Then again, how well can you expect to communicate with a human whose, hands, feet, eyes, ears and mind are all busy with something else?

Voice recognition technology is certainly improving, but I can’t help but wonder about simpler solutions that don’t require cutting edge technology to distract you from the road.

For instance, for the traveling salesman, why not route all your messages through an assistant back at the office? You get your emails read to you hands-free, you can dictate new messages, and you don’t need to train a computer to understand your speech - most humans do it naturally.

Technology can complicate just as much as it simplifies. The best idea, would be one that only simplifies.

Tags: voice recognition, driving, hands-free, iLane