If you call somebody on the plain old telephone network and they're not around, you'll likely get voice mail. It wouldn't be hard for Talko to offer a better interface for this, but I have a hard time seeing killer app potential in this.
Agreed. I hate voice mail -- and while the clunky old interface (dial-tone buttons or what-not) doesn't help -- the thing I don't like is the concept of store-and-forward voice messaging in general.
Now that I think about it -- I did one type of store-and-forward voice+ messaging that I did enjoy somewhat. When a friend of mine went to Japan as an exchange student two? years ahead of me in ... 1995? We exchanged cassette tapes via snail-mail. Each usually was kind of a mix-tape of voice diary/message and some music or other stuff and was accompanied by a letter, maybe with news clippings, pictures etc (I think, it's been a while). It's really the only exchange of voice messages I can remember enjoying.
Perhaps the clue is in the fact that the media has to be part of, or inform the message. Modern (phone) voicemail is usually not (in my experience) actually made as store and forward, but more of a fall-back because synchronous communication wasn't possible. Generally if someone wants to forward me an asynchronous message -- I much prefer text. Either sms or email (or a letter) -- to voicemail. That said, if someone mailed me a cd (or audiofile on a thumbdrive) I'd probably listen to it, and have a rather different experience. Not sure if someone emailed me an audio-file. I'm a bit of a die-hard plain-text email person. I'll stretch to image-attachments, though. But I still feel we got oversold on the idea of multimedia, and it remains a bit of a "fad". I do realize I might be an outlier, though :-)
So maybe an app like this can help inform the media choice, and by virtue of that make store-and-forward voice messaging not-suck. As long as people use them as "voice logs" (like videologs) or something, and not as a means to transmit information. Which is just awful, IMNHO.
And I'll probably still prefer my plain-text -- but thinking about it, I could see it being a useful form of communication after all.
Apologies for rambling, but I think there might be traces of an interesting thought in there.
This sounds even worse. You won't be listening to a voicemail, which most people understand ought to be brief, you'll be listening to a recap of either someone's attempted conversation with you, or two people conversing.
