Forget what you’ve been told. Texting and driving is safe if you use this app

Photo credits: André-Pierre du Plessis .

If you text while driving, the chances of being involved in a road accident increase by a mammoth 2,300 percent. In the US alone, cell phone usage is blamed for half a million injuries and 6,000 fatal car crashes every year.

“Everyone knows it’s dangerous to text while driving,” explains Eli Polak, co-founder of Bazz. “But we do it because of a fear of missing out on an important notification, and we assume an accident won’t happen to us.”

Eli and the team at Bazz are trying to bring safety to roads. They’ve developed a hands-free platform which reads aloud the text or WhatsApp messages you receive while driving. The app includes multiple options to respond without ever having to touch your device.

How it works is fairly simple. Bazz automatically detects when you start driving your car and starts up. It will alert you in the case of an incoming message, after which you can instruct it to ignore or continue dictating.

After hearing the message, users are prompted to respond in four different ways. At this point you can simply say ‘Stop’ and the message will be ignored. Or you can say ‘Text’ and the app will reply with a pre-written message, such as ‘I’m driving at the moment, will call you back.’

There’s an option to reply with a voice message, for which users are given 15 seconds to record or to simply call the sender.

The best part? It’s totally free.

Siri? What Siri?

Eli claims the solution is better than existing voice recognition engines like Siri, Cortana, and Google Now as it’s been engineered to work in noisy environments and recognize non-native English accents.

“We only have a few voice commands, but its allowed us to have 90 percent accuracy,” he adds.

The startup isn’t just targeting ordinary consumers like you and me. The basic version of the app will always remain free for us, but there’s a much more advanced version out there for paying enterprise customers.

That’s the core of Bazz’s monetization strategy, Eli explains. The aim is to target large fleet and logistics companies, allowing managers to communicate with drivers far more efficiently and safely. The paid version of the app allows users to read and respond to emails, WeChat, and Facebook messages. The free version connects with SMS and WhatsApp.

“Instead of telling your driver to respond only when he finishes driving or to park on the side of the road first, now he can do so using our service. It can increase productivity and reduce downtime,” he outlines.