A group messaging app designed for workgroups
Looking for a smarter way to keep a team in touch with one another? Lotus Notes creator and former Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie has an app that he hopes is the right solution for your collaboration needs.
Talko, launched this week on Apple's iOS platform and planned for Android, is a kind of rich media group-texting tool. Imagine a texting app that lets you text individual people or custom sets of users. Now picture the ability to not just text, but also send voice messages and insert images. That, in a nutshell, is Talko.
It's more than that, though, because Talko positions itself as a voice-centric app. Not only can you record voice snippets and insert them in the message flow, along with texts and images, but you can have live group conversations as well.
Here's one way it can work: You tap a group you've already created -- say, the members of a project team you're holding a virtual meeting with. With one tap, you can "call" all of the members and start talking. Other folks can jump in and chat as well, just like an ordinary phone call. You won't lose track of who is talking because the current speaker's avatar is always highlighted. At any point, people can start adding texts and images to the conversation, which are added to the call log in a long flowing record of the call.
A call doesn't disappear after it's over. You can return to that conversation and continue the thread, adding new texts, images and voice memos. This effectively lets you create a continuous conversation that's always available for reference as a sort of archived log.
And it really does work as advertised. We conducted a number of sessions with Talko -- some started as live calls, which switched to asynchronous offline communications as people dropped off the call and added new notes later. Other sessions were never live to begin with, but consisted of trading voice and text memos like a traditional texting app.
That Talko can bridge the gap between live and offline, voice and text, is the good news. Unfortunately, the app needs quite a bit of work.
For starters, the interface is genuinely baffling. It's not rocket science, to be sure, but we muddled our way uncertainly through several sessions before the key elements of Talko really became clear. To the novice, it simply isn't obvious why the ability to place a live call goes away after you start a session in offline mode. Or why you sometimes need to "push to talk" and sometimes don't. Or how to actually search for keywords from old calls.
Searching is perhaps Talko's weakest link. There's no full-text search; you can only filter by hashtags (which you need to remember to apply when setting up a call) and a few other "flags." Search is so weak, in fact, that it calls into question the value of amassing potentially dozens of hours of extensive voice logs of old virtual meetings. Are you really planning to review all those voice memos and live call logs to find something that was said verbally?
Talko is free, though there are plans for a premium subscription that gives you unrestricted access to old calls; the free version discards old calls after a period of time. In the meantime, you can try Talko by downloading it onto your iPhone from the iTunes store. Or you can stick with email, texting (the new version of iMessage in iOS 8 actually supports voice snippets and images), and taking meeting notes, which might actually be more convenient.
Photo courtesy Talko
