In case you did not know, What Three Words is a system that assigns three words to a location in the world within a few metres.
What is the problem this is trying to solve?
Well, the issue is that people often have an exact location but need to convey that to someone else. The classic example is someone on a telephone call to Emergency services. Reading, Speaking, and Typing a latitude and longitude is very error prone. Reading, speaking an typing three common words is less so.
Does it work?
To be frank, I don't know. But the words can easily be confused with similar words. There are examples where one letter, making a word plural, can give a location a few miles away (though often misheard words will be a long way apart).
Another example :
— Bloor (@alexbloor) April 15, 2021
Flames.Shirt.Gasp -vs- Flame.Shirt.Gasp pic.twitter.com/4F7rrGhcz6
Is there a better solution?
Yes, emergency services should get out of the stone age and stop being based on phone calls. A common API to allow calls for voice and video to emergency services with supplementary data should be developed by international co-operation, and become standard on mobile phones. It could allow not only voice, and video, but location data and medical data (many phones have medical data and can even do an ECG, report pulse, temperature, blood sugar, all sorts). This would solve a lot of problems, and I am sure mobile phone operators would be on board with this.
Other ideas?
Well, the issue here is communications. Someone has a device that knows the location and is on a call to someone that needs to know it - whether emergency services, vehicle breakdown, or heck - pizza delivery! How to get that location from an app on the device to someone on the end of a call. That is what W3W does.
Here's an idea...
DTMF is standard on audio calls, and even over mobile it has out of band encoding to work reliably to/from the mobile device if needed. So how about phones (or an app you install) work out that the other party has sent a DTMF sequence. DTMF in to a mobile is rare so something simple like "20" in DTMF would be more than adequate. The phone / app pops up saying "send location?" and if you say yes it sends that as DTMF. A simple *latitude*longitude# would suffice. Maybe use some less common A-D DTMF codes to frame it instead. Of course this could be something an app can send anyway without an in call prompt if the user commands it. It needs some common standard for the DTMF sequence to use, and maybe a check digit is in order.
This would be very easy for the phone app to do. Someone just needs to write a spec. But importantly this is very easy for a call centre system like emergency service, vehicle breakdown, or anyone, to handle automatically. No special API. DTMF is really very standard.
It may be a neat way to do this for now until we have proper multi-media APIs for this.
Or, you know, another "standard"
Plus codes look pretty neat and not that hard to speak. More on the spec here. Given the common usage of using 4 characters and a location name rather than all 8 characters before the plus, this can give a pretty good location with only 4 letters rather than 3 words. Emergency services have a rough location from cell ID anyway, so this has to be better than W3W. Notable some phones (android) have this coding available without installing an app even!
Or even easier than DTMF...
Mountain rescue sent an SMS with a link to click that popped the browser and asked for location access. No flashy interface, as low bandwidth as they could get it. Even worked without 3/4G signal pretty quick.
— Karl Austin (@KarlAustin) April 15, 2021
