[irjustin]

I don't envy the team. It's a great idea but falls short once it leaves the lab. Everything gets really dirty in the real world especially during high stress or emergencies.

Moving to four words could really help remove the need for plural and words that sound similar. Accents really do make things tough.

[sen]

Yeah the general idea is OK, but the practical usage just doesn't pan out unless you remove all plurals, all words that sound similar (including if spoken with different accents), etc etc. Then you end up needing 4-5 words, most with multiple syllables, and you're back to it being just as easy to tell the lat/long or using some other system.

[sneak]

You should envy the team. They've raised tens of millions of dollars for licensing of an algorithm that people RE'd in a day.

Their business now involves lots of bizdev droids and threatening open source implementors with baseless copyright lawsuits. It's nice work if you can get it.

[g_p]

I am surprised they've never tried to introduce some kind of erasure coding or error correction coding. A 4th word from a finite set could act as a "check word" that would detect wrong order of words, mis-spellings of words etc.

I also feel like the solution W3W is trying to deliver is a short term patch until we get emergency SMS location from phones themselves delivered to the control room - having in band spoken location works until you have that, but W3W leaves a lot to be desired. Given it is an app, it might be easier for it to show the user words to read, which are themselves all just NATO phonetic alphabet words to spell their location. You'll get far more redundancy and human error correction over the voice channel using the phonetic alphabet than words.

It wouldn't be as shiny a solution though, and that probably doesn't play into W3W's marketing strategy... Even if it would help save more lives.

[mdoms]

It's not a great idea it's a stupid idea.