Item — HN Reader

> a Kyocera flip phone that she can only use to call and text

She should get a Twilio account. ;-)

I say this half seriously, because I know it may not be in the spirit of the challenge, but it would be enriching to cobble together some simple scripts to receive an SMS and proxy things like Google queries, maybe maps directions, Calendar lookups, maybe a Tweet-sender, HN headline fetcher, etc. It would be constrained but educational and fun. (I say "fun" because HN.) Bonus marks: IVR and/or voice rec version.

1 comments

Google actually did run a service on 600613 (I think) for some time that would text directions and info from certain queries. I was disappointed when I found out it was down.

Wow, that just reminded me of ChaCha.

When I finally got an unlimited text plan(~2009), I asked soo many questions. I was still on dial-up at the time, so it was actually faster than trying to look something up on Yahoo. And as a bonus, I could still use it while my mom was on the phone!

https://www.cnet.com/news/chacha-gives-you-answers-via-text-...

I used it quite a bit and was really sad when it was shut down.