"it's Tom! it's Tom!" iPhone app createes ringtones that say the caller's name..

We know that on most phones these days, the handset will flash up the name of the person calling – “Mum”, “Tom”, “John from the Office”, “Guy I met on a train”, and on many phones you can set a particular ringtone for a particular person, but one iPhone app company decided to take caller recognition a step further. With app 9999 ringtones you can customise the ring tone to say the caller’s name.

As they point out: “Users no longer need to remember which song corresponds to which contact.” yeah!

Using Text-to-Speech recognition and a wide range of accents you can speak a message in, something like: “It’s Tom, it’s Tom, it’s Tom it’s Tom it’s Tom.” then ask the app to play it back in one of dozens of speaking voices: including British Man, Woman, Valley Girl, Jersey Girl, Old Man, and then “funny voices” like Devil, Space Alien, Synthesizer and Whisper.

They cheekily promote the fact that the app in uncensored, so you can record anything (providing the voice recognition software recognises it of course).

As a rule of thumb, I counsel against that. It’s all very well if “That Bastard” or “Mr Sexytime” only calls you in your bedroom, but if the ringtone goes off anywhere else it spells embarrassment. I’m thinking of professional contexts.

You can also set customised messages on alarms, like “pick up Tanya now”. Could be useful.

We were a bit put off by the faff around using your email address, still it pops up correctly in Quick Time after a few seconds.

9999 Ringtones Uncensored PRO is £0.59 on iTunes
There are several free versions with fewer voices available