Emails For Small Screens

New Scientist has picked up on a patent application from Motorola for abridging emails to read on a PDA or mobile (PDF). “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”.
A concern was raised that important messages could be deleted without being fully read…for example, “By the way, you’re fired,” might slip through the net. (via Textually.org)
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