Record voice messages and store them on Near Field Communication (NFC) tags. Leave a message for your partner, a reminder for yourself, create a public social experiment or professional multi-language tags for an exhibition!
As an optional premium feature, NearSpeak automatically translates your messages to always play in the user’s language.
To listen to the message, tap the tag with your phone. Your phone will ask you to launch NearSpeak, which will then immediately speak your message: either in the language you specified, or automatically translated to the current phone language!
How does it work?
NearSpeak uses speech recognition when listening to you, in order to convert your voice to text – NFC tags do not have enough storage space for an MP3 file (typical tag size: <= 150 bytes).
In additon to creating a single-language tag where the text is directly stored on the NFC tag, you can also create cloud-based multi-language tags that always speak the language of your user. For example, record your message in English; if a Japanese phone taps the NFC tag, the user will hear your message in Japanese – automatically translated by NearSpeak. Purchase Translation Packs within the app to enable this premium feature.
Finally, just tap an NFC tag to write your message.
The NFC tag is now associated with the NearSpeak app – tapping will automatically launch NearSpeak and read out your message using speech synthesis. In case the phone doesn’t have NearSpeak installed yet, the user is sent to the Windows Phone Store to download the free NearSpeak app.
What is NFC?
Near Field Communication is a feature of your phone that allows communicating between two devices in close proximity, or between your phone and a special sticker, also called NFC tag. NearSpeak writes your voice messages to NFC tags; other phones that tap the tag later on will read the stored voice message.
You can order any kind of supported NFC tag from online stores for use with the app. Make sure it’s a standardized NFC Forum Type 1 – 4 tag or a Mifare tag. For Windows Phone to write to the tag, it needs to be NDEF formatted (= not empty) and not encrypted or otherwise secured. You can order compatible tags right through the app.
Download
You can download the free NearSpeak app for all NFC capable Windows Phone 8 devices from the Windows Phone Store. Usage of the app is subject to the terms of use.
Interested in how to develop an app that features speech recognition, NFC and speech synthesis? Check out the NFC Quickstart presentation on Slideshare.
