Ray Ozzie, former chief software architect at Microsoft and co-creator of Lotus Notes, and his team are debuting the product illustrating two years of hard work and planning called Talko, a messenger app that seeks the perfect blend of voice and text.
Oooh and shhhh... don't let on about Facebook's Messenger app.
The Talko app enables users to tag voice notes to images, texts and video. Enhancing the multimedia brew the freemium app offers, Talko also features a tagging system that can be used to enhance messages with tags such as "urgent" or "progress."
"We believe that amazing things happen when we talk with each other - - thoughts are shared, ideas formed and problems solved," states a Talko representative. "That's why we built Talko. It's an app that helps people talk, share and do things using the most human form of communication we have, our voices."
At first glance, Talko may seem a bit late to the party to anyone who has granted Facebook the right to every sensor and metric on his or her smartphone and tried the company's messaging app -- for those who haven't, you can send all sorts of media to friends via Messenger. The enterprise mindset imparted into Ozzie's app helps it form a unique identity, to a degree.
Talko supports full phone calls, so that teams of employees can can chime in on conference sessions with tags and images. Talko includes bookmarking and archiving features, which allows teams to share and store notated conference calls with others -- they're also part of Talko's freemium structure, according to Ozzie.
"In business, having old calls is critical," says Ozzie. "We keep a 10-day rolling window of calls for businesses, and if they want to retain them longer we will charge."
Ozzie began working on communications tools to improve productivity in 1984, he says. It was a PC-centric world, filled with slides and charts, but a lot has changed since then and he attributes it largely to what he calls "social productivity" tools.
"I can't predict how this thing will turn out, but by making voice as easy to use as text it will change things," says Ozzie. "If the Internet had been invented first, every voice call would be viewed by a different standard."
Right now, Talko is only available for iOS. The Talko Team plans to support more platforms soon, specifically web and Android.
