Those clever designers at Ford may just have enabled Hands-free tweeting to arrive in Britain. 

New technology being fitted to some Ford cars will give drivers Twitter updates read out loud to them robotically while they're driving. Future versions will enable drivers to dictate their own tweets via a voice recognition system without taking their hands off the wheel.

The system, already in the American Ford Fiesta, also reads out text messages received on drivers' smartphones, and is expected to be fitted to the Focus in Britain next year and then rolled out across the range to enable safer driving.

The service is part of the MyFord project, which aims to connect drivers ever more closely to the in-car computer. As well as connecting drivers' phones via Bluetooth, the voice recognition system also enables drivers to operate their MP3 players via the car stereo using voice commands. It is sensitive enough to be able to recognise individual song requests, so, for example, rather than just saying "play music" — the command recognised by existing systems — the driver will be able to specify the artist and song, and the computer will do the rest.

Source: Ford