I wonder what a true voice IM clent would look like. The beauty of I’m that is lost in clients like Skype is it’s impossible to maintain several asyncronous near real-time conversations at once. You can hear this problem is you ever listen to a taxi radio. Perhaps when you focus different windows it could catch up on the discrete voice clips since the last time you were on that window. The whole chat UI could be a button you hold down while speaking, like a HAM radio.
‘I’m clent’?
The mind boggles.
This also opens up the possibility to replay audio (or could) instead of things having to be real-time. Sometimes if I can’t hear something I want to replay it instead of saying, “Huh?” for the 3rd time. Good idea!
HAM radio-like button is soooo ’80 (:
Anyway, who needs one when we have voice activated recorders?
But the “replay last message” thingie could be useful.
I wrote this from a Blackberry, so please excuse the typos.
MSN messenger 7.5 does this, its called voice clips.
http://messenger.msn.com/Feature/WhatsNew.aspx
You hold down F2 button to talk, and release to send.
Like a realtime voicemail kinda thing 🙂
Check out my Slawesome application: http://slawesome.com
It is voice over email.
Voice IM such as Push-to-Talk is one future possibility.
You may want to investigate the “OverHear” idea:
http://communitywiki.org/OverHear
The idea is that we should be able to overhear conversations that people are having, if they don’t mind them being public.
With decent speech-to-text, you should even be able to perform live indexing over all public conversations on the planet!
You could also do the equivalent of blogging: Just speaking out into the nothingness, and whoever your subscribers are, they hear your voice. If they’re interested, they can talk back.
A new vocabulary word to learn! Clent: taking steps to hold on to your client. A combo of clench and client. 🙂 Also a boy’s name from parents who don’t know how to spell Clint.
Actually, the first ever VoIP client I ever used (if it could be called that) was an Intel released voice chat client. For the life of me I can’t remember what its called but think Roger Wilco, or Ventrilo but back in 98-00. It had great sound quality, we easily could run 20 some people on it over a cable connection (that person being the “server”) and a 56k dialup was sufficient for talking.
To talk, you just held a key and when you let up it sent. While you were talking voice would still be incoming.
chris: That wasn’t iparty was it? I still have that installed. 😀