Social networking is the flavor of the season!!! Voike Inc., a Florida based start-up, has launched an interesting VoIP application that combines (or seeks to combine) the power of VoIP and social networking. As Jaime Jaramillo (CEO, Voike Inc.) explains, “…the core application is to use the Voike dashboard as a blog and message center to disseminate spoken word messages, comments, and other content to Blogs and social networking sites.” This is what Voike can do for you…
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In terms of functionality, Voike (in its current form) allows you to add audio to your blog or profile using just your telephone. Users can also e-mail, forward, redistribute, re-play, reply, comment, and relay these interactive voice messages. All you need to do is register with the phone that you will use with Voike. Then call the Voike number using the registered phone and follow the IVR for instruction on how to use it (it is relatively straight forward). This is a nice way of communicating with a large group, just record your message and send it to the entire group. Although not as efficient as DialMyCalls that delivers the message directly to the phones, it is a nice option.
Another interesting functionality, is the ability to make free conference calls. You could also use Voike to create free telephone conference sessions. The process is similar to other conference services where you can create a conference session and invite the other participants. Once again, you could save the conference and email or forward it to other users.
The company is planning to roll out advanced aplications such as product reviews, live performances, complaints, etc. The idea seems to replace the written format with audio. The idea is great, however, I am not sure to what extent this goal will be achieved. Some basic questions need to be addressed:
- What is the best content for such a format? I am not sure whether all the blogs will jump on to this platform.
- What about content indexing by search engines? Media files have a big issue of searchability, limiting their widespread usage (at least till audio searching matures). Search engines are limited in their ability to index the content of the media files. Not many would not want their site to be not indexed by the Google bots.
- What is the unique offering? How does the technology compare with existing technologies like Text-To-Speech (TTS) or speech recognition?
All said, this is an interesting service and worth trying out. You could become a “Voiker” right now by signing up for your account here. If you have already tried this service, share your opinion. Also let us how could this service be improved to make it really useful…
