Talko, a new app aims to reinvent phone call

Talko, a new iPhone app, focuses on group calls and
organizing an ongoing stream of communication.
Ray Ozzie, former chief technology officer at Microsoft,
has a theory about why people are more interested in
texting or e-mailing than talking on the phone: he thinks
they often despise hearing the phone ring. “They hate
getting interrupted, not knowing what the priority or
subject of the call is,” says Ozzie , a distinguished
programmer who has a long history of creating
collaboration software, including Lotus Notes.
In an effort to get people talking more, Ozzie and two
cofounders spent the last two years building Talko , a
communication app. Ozzie says the fact that other
smartphone communication methods like texts, e-mails,
and photos can be saved, searched, and forwarded to
others makes the humble voice call less appealing—even
though voice is sometimes the best medium for fast,
efficient, and effective communications.
Talko, which rolls out today, focuses on group calls.
Talko conversations can be tagged by subject and are
recorded and stored by default. Because calls are
preserved, you can bookmark bits of audio with notes to
keep track of key points, and those notes can be seen by
someone who couldn’t take part in the live discussion.
You can also add hashtags to conversations so you can
search by topic later on, and any member of a group can
add audio messages to a discussion at another time.
Available initially for the iPhone, with an Android
version to follow in several months, Talko incorporates
text and photos as well, allowing you to send written
messages to others while an audio call is in progress or
share photos immediately as you take them.
In a demo of the app showing how a team of several
people might use it, the display showed an annotated
audio stream at the bottom of the screen and a busy but
organized stream of texts and photos above. At the top
of the display, bubbles containing team members’
photos indicated who was active in a call and who
wasn’t.
Though the app is clearly focused on companies whose
teams may want to use the app to keep organized, Ozzie
believes consumers will also use it for things like
planning trips or just maintaining a chronological,
ongoing stream of mixed-media communication.
Ozzie uses it with his children, who live on opposite
sides of the country, and he says it has cut down on
occasional “guilt calls” they would make to him. “Now,
it’s just so much more fluid,” he says. “People might
just drop a photo in there and begin a conversation with
a photo.”
Talko plans to make money by charging businesses,
though it will also offer a free version that archives
recorded calls for a week rather than permanently. The
company has been testing the app for more than a year
with hundreds of people at a number of different
businesses.
In time, Ozzie hopes, Talko will do other things—
automatically create written transcripts, for instance. He
hopes the app can do this more precisely because each
user is speaking into an individual phone, making it
easier to separate the audio into different streams.
Ozzie can also envision, say, tagging people’s names as
they’re mentioned in calls to allow the app to
automatically create calendar appointments. But he’s
wary of doing much with users’ data. “We’re being very
conservative,” he says.