4 ms·

Talko

70 points by frankus 12y ago

georgemcbay 12y ago
Awesome, a smartphone app that allows me to communicate with people via voice. This might be exactly the killer app that mobile phones have been waiting for.
- hawkice 12y ago
  Killer feature request: a dual-streaming mode where I can talk and hear a friend talk at the same time. The future is gonna be AWESOME.
  - jsmeaton 12y ago
    Whoa whoa whoa. FULL duplex?!
    - hawkice 12y ago
      That's what I'm imagining. I know the engineers figured out a way to get it to work walky-talky style where you can either speak or listen (but not both) two-way -- let's call that partial duplex -- but I think the new wave of innovating social mobile apps could really utilize the flat network design paradigm in this new way, creating a whole new way to communicate with friends that also opens doors for enterprise usage. I think this could really make the world a better place.
      - davedx 12y ago
        They should totally build it in Clojure and Erlang!
        hawkice 12y ago
        The idea you'd know we're building it, and how? Absurd! Let's follow the example of the founder in question -- STEALTH it. Come on, that's how to have SUPER ADVANCED technology.
  - blackstrype 12y ago
    "The Voxer application, for example, is capable of supporting full-duplex communication, allowing two (or more) participants of a conversation to engage in near real-time communication, similar to a synchronous telephone call. Participants are therefore required to select the PTT feature for the entire duration of the full-duplex exchange, which may be inconvenient after a certain period of time." http://www.google.com/patents/US20130295982 http://www.google.com/patents/US20130295982
- tdicola 12y ago
  Can we add some way to send short text messages too?
  - junto 12y ago
    Yeah, Ok, if we must. I'll chuck it in as an appendix to the spec. Not that anyone will ever use it! I'll have to limit it to 160 characters though because I've only got 140 bytes to play with. It's not like you can write anything meaningful with 160 chars anyway! When the hardware gets better we'll write a proper text messaging implementation. Lol!
- swartkrans 12y ago
  WhatsApp and Line are multi-billion dollar companies that replaced a simple thing phones could already do. Laughing and making sarcastic jokes at something that makes voice mail better and easier with a nice UI by a proven competent individual is probably the wrong response to make, especially when the UI and features look pretty gangbuster. A little bit of polish and better ease of use can make whole lot of people happy and also lots of money.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - akira2501 12y ago
    WhatsApp is highly price-competitive with the native offerings, particularly in the markets where it is most popular. It also benefits from wide cross platform and cross network availability. While the UI for Talko might be slick, there are already very similar and competitive offerings to Talko that operate on multiple platforms (e.g. Voxer) that have failed to take any market share the way Talko apparently hopes to. If they're going to be successful, it will boil down to marketing more than anything.
    - blackstrype 12y ago
      I agree, powerful marketing will make the difference -- seeing as Voxer is essentially the same product.
- downandout 12y ago
  I had the same thought when I first saw Uber. "I have the number for XYZ taxi/limo service programmed into my phone. What's so special here?". To the vast majority of people, a better interface for doing something they already do is itself a killer app. Ask a teenager how often they email their friends. They'll laugh at you. Why? Because Snapchat and Instagram are better interfaces for communicating the things they want than traditional email. Talko is arguably a better interface than most professionals use for many aspects of communications, so they have at least a reasonable chance of success.
- woah 12y ago
  Hardy har har
roskilli 12y ago
I love it "Available for iPhone. More platforms coming." I really think he hit the nail on the head with his memo when leaving MSFT...
artbikes 12y ago
Talkomatic was the world's first multi-user chat application. It was hosted on the PLATO system where Ray Ozzie once worked. There is a online version created by the original authors at: http://talko.cc/ http://talko.cc/
- g_h 12y ago
  I was curious about the timeline of chat applications and googled it. EMISARI pre-dated Talkomatic by a couple years: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm
fossuser 12y ago
Voice isn't the clearest or the fastest way to communicate. I'd suggest the opposite - that's it's slow, unclear and probably the worst form of digital communication. There's no good log, it's not silent, you can't link to other information (or copy it) and it requires one person to stop talking before another can start. This all aside, iOS 8 now let's you send voice messages in the default messages app - seems like this company has no market?
- justinpaulson 12y ago
  I came to say this, but also wanted to add that searching a voice communication is quite problematic compared to a written conversation. For evidence of how unclear it is, just look at the amount of times journalists use brackets to clean up quotations because people tend to speak in broken fragments.
- tantalor 12y ago
  Voice is much more clear because it conveys nuance, such as sarcasm, which text cannot. I bet speaking is much faster than typing for most people, although reading is faster than listening. Voice (sound) is analog, not digital! Converting voice to text solves a lot of these problems, but this app doesn't do that.
  - fossuser 12y ago
    I'd argue that nuance is harder to determine through voice on a phone when you can't read body language and have a harder time hearing them. It's pretty easy through text when you know the person or use an emoticon. Videochat is definitely better than text for that reason though still don't have a log or ability to search/copy. By digital I meant communicating with some sort of digital device and not face to face or through a letter.
- hrvbr 12y ago
  There's also no good search engine for audio messages. This may be a big deal for businesses, when compared with email.
neolefty 12y ago
I haven't used Talko, but it sounds like a converged communication app, kind of Wave-ish, combining real-time (talk, chat) asynchronous (like email) and an archive organized by conversation. Plus convenient and easy? Is that right?
EdSharkey 12y ago
Joel Spolsky's Architecture Astronaut rants do, perhaps unfairly in this case, immediately spring to my mind. Especially as Joel calls out Ray Ozzie by-name ... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html Communications applications have to be extremely hard to pull off successfully, and God bless Ozzie for trying again. I'm tempted to spout off on how one would do this thing "right", but I think that would make me the astronaut pot calling the architect kettle black.
- noblethrasher 12y ago
  But then again, this appears in the article you linked: “Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.”
  - tantalor 12y ago
    It's not. Collaborative editing is. People were using file syncing for asynchronous collaborative editing. File syncing is not such a big deal now that we have synchronous collaborative editors.
    - marcusf 12y ago
      Dropbox?
      - threatofrain 12y ago
        I'd say Google Drive, because the web app is so complete and nice that for simple purposes, you wouldn't mind not installing the desktop client, especially since you edit the files on the web anyway. So off-site storage + collaborative editing = Google Drive. Dropbox, on the other hand, is mostly a file syncing service; they may have some photo features on their web app, but that's it outside of file syncing.
        12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
natch 12y ago
It seems like a cheap shot, but it has to be said: I'm having trouble seeing what this provides that iMessage doesn't provide already: - Text, check. - Pictures and videos, check. - Group messaging, check. - Voice messaging, check. It sounds like they recreated the iMessage core features, other than the ability to fall back to SMS for text. I wonder about privacy protection. Maybe there are some other bells and whistles on top?
- tantalor 12y ago
  > We're working on our Android and web apps. iMessage doesn't have that.
taspeotis 12y ago
My opinion of this application is as follows, and nothing on the page really convinces me that my perception of the application is wrong so I have very little impetus to install it and find out how right or wrong I am. First impression is it's a nice, professional and polished application but it's an application that makes noise. Which means (on my iPhone): * When I'm listening to music with my headphones on and some communication comes in from this app, it's going to be via voice and my music will fade out. * When I open the app it's going to initialise the sound device even though it doesn't need to make sound just yet and my music will fade out just by opening the app. (Not guaranteed: a lot of apps do this, this one could too.) * When this app starts playing instead of my music it's going to confuse my car's entertainment system and my music won't start again. (This problem is specific to my car.) Basically this app is going to be annoying in ways that iMessage and email are not.
frankus 12y ago
I remember thinking it was pretty revolutionary when I got a demo back in early 2013 (had an interview there, but got a too-good-to-refuse offer elsewhere). Granted, that was before FaceTime audio and the audio features of iMessage, but at the time I was basically ready to bury everything on my iPhone's dock and replace it with this as soon as it launched. It has a ton of really slick touches that I think make it a really compelling app, well beyond the sum of it's core features.
turingbook 12y ago
Ray Ozzie's launch blog is also great: https://medium.com/talko-team-talk-share-do/welcome-to-talko-9e6ed73d7002 https://medium.com/talko-team-talk-share-do/welcome-to-talko...?
programmer_dude 12y ago
>The software visionary who created Lotus Notes Stopped reading after this.
- Renaud 12y ago
  Lotus Notes was revolutionary and visionary when it came out, in 1989. That it failed to really adapt to a changing technological landscape and failed to meet user expectations is more an indictment of the management at Lotus/IBM than an indictment of the initial creator.
  - socrates2014 12y ago
    Didn't the Web overtake Lotus Notes for many purposes? No server to pay for, open to anyone, etc...
stefanve 12y ago
I don't have an iPhone so I can't install it but it could be a case of bad communication. At least the product page doesn't explain what problem it is trying to solve or what the difference is between this an hangout or whatsapp. So it just looks like just another app. And maybe it is
Harshit15 12y ago
There may be many apps, solving different parts of this problem, but putting all these different parts under one roof can sometimes make a difference. That's what they are doing.
onion2k 12y ago
The tech and UX side of this app are both quite interesting, but the real story will be in their user acquisition. Getting people, particularly people under 35, to use a new communications app is really hard because they have to persuade people in their networks to use it too, otherwise it offers no value. Skype did it by being really easy video conferencing, WhatsApp did it by being a free alternative to SMS, Snapchat did it by automatically deleting sexts. On the face of it, Talko offers nothing that people don't already have, so it'll be interesting to see how and where they push it.
WalterBright 12y ago
I'm not too thrilled with the idea of a phone that automatically records and archives my voice conversations. When I call someone, I prefer to not have the stress of being careful of every word I say, lest someone try to make something of every inane comment I make, and I make a lot of them.
hrktb 12y ago
I found this landing page extremely diluted from a information point of view. From the first block: Amazing things can happen when we talk with each other. Thoughts are shared, ideas formed and problems solved. Talko is the best way to use your voice to get things done. The first sentence doesn't bring me any information, it's just a bland statement. The second is an expansion of the first. The third says this Talko thing is a way to do things with your voice. I felt like loo¥sing my time reading nonsense, when I could be learning about a new app and see demos of cool features.
lvturner 12y ago
Haven't yet played with this, but every time there is talk of a new messenger, no one ever mentions WeChat, I guess it's just not that popular out of mainland China, but it blows whatsapp out of the water. If even for the very simple fact that I don't have to hit "Send" I just hit "Enter/Done" on the keyboard, more phone-based messaging apps should do this imo
buro9 12y ago
This looks like a reinvention of, and blurring of the lines between, voicemail and the phone call. And actually, I like the idea. Sometimes I find email and SMS a chore, but would love to leave my partner a 5 second "Hey I'm picking up milk, do you need anything else?" message that was auto-transcribed, and if I were on the tube (unavailable) she could leave a message for me "Yeah, some of those star-shaped veg, you know the ones next to the beans down the end of the second aisle". She'd never have typed that into an SMS, and I probably would've just winged trying to think if there was anything she needed. Metropolis transportation and living makes communication broken and fractured. Real-time mobile communication works only when both people are online... so a near real-time thing that overcomes the flaws of mobile coverage in cityscapes and their transport (cycling, underground metro systems, etc) and still retain a personal touch would be great.

70 points by frankus 12y ago

Awesome, a smartphone app that allows me to communicate with people via voice. This might be exactly the killer app that mobile phones have been waiting for.

hawkice 12y ago
Killer feature request: a dual-streaming mode where I can talk and hear a friend talk at the same time. The future is gonna be AWESOME.
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  Whoa whoa whoa. FULL duplex?!
  - hawkice 12y ago
    That's what I'm imagining. I know the engineers figured out a way to get it to work walky-talky style where you can either speak or listen (but not both) two-way -- let's call that partial duplex -- but I think the new wave of innovating social mobile apps could really utilize the flat network design paradigm in this new way, creating a whole new way to communicate with friends that also opens doors for enterprise usage. I think this could really make the world a better place.
    - davedx 12y ago
      They should totally build it in Clojure and Erlang!
      - hawkice 12y ago
        The idea you'd know we're building it, and how? Absurd! Let's follow the example of the founder in question -- STEALTH it. Come on, that's how to have SUPER ADVANCED technology.
- blackstrype 12y ago
  "The Voxer application, for example, is capable of supporting full-duplex communication, allowing two (or more) participants of a conversation to engage in near real-time communication, similar to a synchronous telephone call. Participants are therefore required to select the PTT feature for the entire duration of the full-duplex exchange, which may be inconvenient after a certain period of time." http://www.google.com/patents/US20130295982 http://www.google.com/patents/US20130295982
tdicola 12y ago
Can we add some way to send short text messages too?
- junto 12y ago
  Yeah, Ok, if we must. I'll chuck it in as an appendix to the spec. Not that anyone will ever use it! I'll have to limit it to 160 characters though because I've only got 140 bytes to play with. It's not like you can write anything meaningful with 160 chars anyway! When the hardware gets better we'll write a proper text messaging implementation. Lol!
swartkrans 12y ago
WhatsApp and Line are multi-billion dollar companies that replaced a simple thing phones could already do. Laughing and making sarcastic jokes at something that makes voice mail better and easier with a nice UI by a proven competent individual is probably the wrong response to make, especially when the UI and features look pretty gangbuster. A little bit of polish and better ease of use can make whole lot of people happy and also lots of money.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- akira2501 12y ago
  WhatsApp is highly price-competitive with the native offerings, particularly in the markets where it is most popular. It also benefits from wide cross platform and cross network availability. While the UI for Talko might be slick, there are already very similar and competitive offerings to Talko that operate on multiple platforms (e.g. Voxer) that have failed to take any market share the way Talko apparently hopes to. If they're going to be successful, it will boil down to marketing more than anything.
  - blackstrype 12y ago
    I agree, powerful marketing will make the difference -- seeing as Voxer is essentially the same product.
downandout 12y ago
I had the same thought when I first saw Uber. "I have the number for XYZ taxi/limo service programmed into my phone. What's so special here?". To the vast majority of people, a better interface for doing something they already do is itself a killer app. Ask a teenager how often they email their friends. They'll laugh at you. Why? Because Snapchat and Instagram are better interfaces for communicating the things they want than traditional email. Talko is arguably a better interface than most professionals use for many aspects of communications, so they have at least a reasonable chance of success.
woah 12y ago
Hardy har har

roskilli 12y ago

I love it "Available for iPhone. More platforms coming." I really think he hit the nail on the head with his memo when leaving MSFT...

artbikes 12y ago

Talkomatic was the world's first multi-user chat application. It was hosted on the PLATO system where Ray Ozzie once worked. There is a online version created by the original authors at: http://talko.cc/ http://talko.cc/

g_h 12y ago
I was curious about the timeline of chat applications and googled it. EMISARI pre-dated Talkomatic by a couple years: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm

fossuser 12y ago

Voice isn't the clearest or the fastest way to communicate. I'd suggest the opposite - that's it's slow, unclear and probably the worst form of digital communication. There's no good log, it's not silent, you can't link to other information (or copy it) and it requires one person to stop talking before another can start. This all aside, iOS 8 now let's you send voice messages in the default messages app - seems like this company has no market?

justinpaulson 12y ago
I came to say this, but also wanted to add that searching a voice communication is quite problematic compared to a written conversation. For evidence of how unclear it is, just look at the amount of times journalists use brackets to clean up quotations because people tend to speak in broken fragments.
tantalor 12y ago
Voice is much more clear because it conveys nuance, such as sarcasm, which text cannot. I bet speaking is much faster than typing for most people, although reading is faster than listening. Voice (sound) is analog, not digital! Converting voice to text solves a lot of these problems, but this app doesn't do that.
- fossuser 12y ago
  I'd argue that nuance is harder to determine through voice on a phone when you can't read body language and have a harder time hearing them. It's pretty easy through text when you know the person or use an emoticon. Videochat is definitely better than text for that reason though still don't have a log or ability to search/copy. By digital I meant communicating with some sort of digital device and not face to face or through a letter.
hrvbr 12y ago
There's also no good search engine for audio messages. This may be a big deal for businesses, when compared with email.

neolefty 12y ago

I haven't used Talko, but it sounds like a converged communication app, kind of Wave-ish, combining real-time (talk, chat) asynchronous (like email) and an archive organized by conversation. Plus convenient and easy? Is that right?

EdSharkey 12y ago

Joel Spolsky's Architecture Astronaut rants do, perhaps unfairly in this case, immediately spring to my mind. Especially as Joel calls out Ray Ozzie by-name ... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html Communications applications have to be extremely hard to pull off successfully, and God bless Ozzie for trying again. I'm tempted to spout off on how one would do this thing "right", but I think that would make me the astronaut pot calling the architect kettle black.

noblethrasher 12y ago
But then again, this appears in the article you linked: “Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.”
- tantalor 12y ago
  It's not. Collaborative editing is. People were using file syncing for asynchronous collaborative editing. File syncing is not such a big deal now that we have synchronous collaborative editors.
  - marcusf 12y ago
    Dropbox?
    - threatofrain 12y ago
      I'd say Google Drive, because the web app is so complete and nice that for simple purposes, you wouldn't mind not installing the desktop client, especially since you edit the files on the web anyway. So off-site storage + collaborative editing = Google Drive. Dropbox, on the other hand, is mostly a file syncing service; they may have some photo features on their web app, but that's it outside of file syncing.
      - 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

natch 12y ago

It seems like a cheap shot, but it has to be said: I'm having trouble seeing what this provides that iMessage doesn't provide already: - Text, check. - Pictures and videos, check. - Group messaging, check. - Voice messaging, check. It sounds like they recreated the iMessage core features, other than the ability to fall back to SMS for text. I wonder about privacy protection. Maybe there are some other bells and whistles on top?

tantalor 12y ago
> We're working on our Android and web apps. iMessage doesn't have that.

taspeotis 12y ago

My opinion of this application is as follows, and nothing on the page really convinces me that my perception of the application is wrong so I have very little impetus to install it and find out how right or wrong I am. First impression is it's a nice, professional and polished application but it's an application that makes noise. Which means (on my iPhone): * When I'm listening to music with my headphones on and some communication comes in from this app, it's going to be via voice and my music will fade out. * When I open the app it's going to initialise the sound device even though it doesn't need to make sound just yet and my music will fade out just by opening the app. (Not guaranteed: a lot of apps do this, this one could too.) * When this app starts playing instead of my music it's going to confuse my car's entertainment system and my music won't start again. (This problem is specific to my car.) Basically this app is going to be annoying in ways that iMessage and email are not.

frankus 12y ago

I remember thinking it was pretty revolutionary when I got a demo back in early 2013 (had an interview there, but got a too-good-to-refuse offer elsewhere). Granted, that was before FaceTime audio and the audio features of iMessage, but at the time I was basically ready to bury everything on my iPhone's dock and replace it with this as soon as it launched. It has a ton of really slick touches that I think make it a really compelling app, well beyond the sum of it's core features.

turingbook 12y ago

Ray Ozzie's launch blog is also great: https://medium.com/talko-team-talk-share-do/welcome-to-talko-9e6ed73d7002 https://medium.com/talko-team-talk-share-do/welcome-to-talko...?

programmer_dude 12y ago

>The software visionary who created Lotus Notes Stopped reading after this.

Renaud 12y ago
Lotus Notes was revolutionary and visionary when it came out, in 1989. That it failed to really adapt to a changing technological landscape and failed to meet user expectations is more an indictment of the management at Lotus/IBM than an indictment of the initial creator.
- socrates2014 12y ago
  Didn't the Web overtake Lotus Notes for many purposes? No server to pay for, open to anyone, etc...

stefanve 12y ago

I don't have an iPhone so I can't install it but it could be a case of bad communication. At least the product page doesn't explain what problem it is trying to solve or what the difference is between this an hangout or whatsapp. So it just looks like just another app. And maybe it is

Harshit15 12y ago

There may be many apps, solving different parts of this problem, but putting all these different parts under one roof can sometimes make a difference. That's what they are doing.

onion2k 12y ago

The tech and UX side of this app are both quite interesting, but the real story will be in their user acquisition. Getting people, particularly people under 35, to use a new communications app is really hard because they have to persuade people in their networks to use it too, otherwise it offers no value. Skype did it by being really easy video conferencing, WhatsApp did it by being a free alternative to SMS, Snapchat did it by automatically deleting sexts. On the face of it, Talko offers nothing that people don't already have, so it'll be interesting to see how and where they push it.

WalterBright 12y ago

I'm not too thrilled with the idea of a phone that automatically records and archives my voice conversations. When I call someone, I prefer to not have the stress of being careful of every word I say, lest someone try to make something of every inane comment I make, and I make a lot of them.

hrktb 12y ago

I found this landing page extremely diluted from a information point of view. From the first block: Amazing things can happen when we talk with each other. Thoughts are shared, ideas formed and problems solved. Talko is the best way to use your voice to get things done. The first sentence doesn't bring me any information, it's just a bland statement. The second is an expansion of the first. The third says this Talko thing is a way to do things with your voice. I felt like loo¥sing my time reading nonsense, when I could be learning about a new app and see demos of cool features.

lvturner 12y ago

Haven't yet played with this, but every time there is talk of a new messenger, no one ever mentions WeChat, I guess it's just not that popular out of mainland China, but it blows whatsapp out of the water. If even for the very simple fact that I don't have to hit "Send" I just hit "Enter/Done" on the keyboard, more phone-based messaging apps should do this imo

buro9 12y ago

This looks like a reinvention of, and blurring of the lines between, voicemail and the phone call. And actually, I like the idea. Sometimes I find email and SMS a chore, but would love to leave my partner a 5 second "Hey I'm picking up milk, do you need anything else?" message that was auto-transcribed, and if I were on the tube (unavailable) she could leave a message for me "Yeah, some of those star-shaped veg, you know the ones next to the beans down the end of the second aisle". She'd never have typed that into an SMS, and I probably would've just winged trying to think if there was anything she needed. Metropolis transportation and living makes communication broken and fractured. Real-time mobile communication works only when both people are online... so a near real-time thing that overcomes the flaws of mobile coverage in cityscapes and their transport (cycling, underground metro systems, etc) and still retain a personal touch would be great.