Any progammers looking for a killer app to develop? How about a voice enabled forum?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Well, I have no doubt that some people would like this “killer app”, but frankly I wouldn’t join in.

For starters - I’ve completely disabled the sound on my present computer - I got so freakin’ tired of the beeps, chortles, whoots, and other noises coming out of the machine I just tossed the whole lot. I like to see my machines, not hear them. So that should indiciate right there I’m not your target audience.

Secondly - what about the problem of accents? The SD has hundreds of posters to whom English is a second language and their pronunciation might be problematic. Even for those of us for whom English is our native tongue, the accent differences between the UK, USA, Canada and Australia can impose significant bottlenecks to clear communication. I think text eliminates the whole problem of accents - on more than one occassion I’ve had more success writing a conversation with a lost tourist in Chicago than trying to surmount the oral language barrier.

I’d really miss talking to the deaf folks I’ve met on the Internet, many of whom have difficult to understand speech, and none of whom would be able to use this nice “voice board” service. On the up side, I might run into some interesting blind folks - but then, I run into them from time to time already on the Internet.

Next time you’re in a coffee house conversation look at who the dominant speakers are - they tend to be men, and they tend to interrupt women and other, less dominant men, who don’t get a chance to fully express themselves. On the Internet, you can’t tell who is male or female, young or old, or any of those frequently-irrelevant-to-the-conversation details. Those who aren’t males with opera-strong voices frequently find message boards a better forum for their views than open voice conversation.

The point that many people read much faster than they can speak has been brought up multiple times.

Also, I can write a bunch of text then go back and change just a word here and there to correct small errors or enhance the meaning - can’t do that with voice. If it’s not what you wanted, you have to re-do the whole thing. What a pain.

So, while I think the idea is interesting and probably has some merit and an audience, I’m not excited over it and likely would seldom, if ever, utilize such a service even if it was free.

22 
Rich and compelling?  All right -- let's try a sample and see what happens:

Ready29003 – "Um, I was, um wondering what’s the fastest a <undecipherable because Ready29003 is doing the dishes and just turned on the faucet>.

Multiple Random Responders: “WTF dude?”.

Ready29003 – “Um, I was, um wondering what’s the fastest a human being has ever travelled.”

Multiple Random Buttheads – “Look it up, dumbass”.
Multiple Random Perverts (if Ready is female) – “Hey, you wanna ****?”
Multiple Random People Who Aren’t As Funny As They Think – “1 MILLION miles an hour. No, wait, a BILLION miles an hour.”
Multiple Random Geeks-- “Well, on the New Generation, they got up to Warp 11 1/2 in the episode where aliens take over the ship and pour Nitro in the warp engines.”
Multiple Random People who Know Only Slightly More Than You Do – “Well, it was probably one of the space missions, because escape velocity is something like seven miles per second. Although I guess they didn’t really escape Earth’s gravity because they went into orbit.”
One guy who actually knows off the top of his head but is carrying on a conversation over the internet while driving --“That would be on Apollo mission 14 when they actually reached a – oh, wait a minute, tree! AHHHHHHHHHHHH <silence>”

But suppose you actually said something that actually merits a conversation instead of a quick response. How would that work?

Ready29003 – “computer – index under politics, bush, and, um, election”. “I think Bush has a pretty good chance of getting re-elected next term if he gets the deficit under control.”

Random Spam-- “If you’re having trouble with your erections…”

Ready29003 – “Skip”

Random Spam-- “If you’d like bigger erections…”

Ready29003 – “Skip!”

Random Spam-- “Something vile involving bush and erections.”

Ready29003 – “Skip! SKIP! SKIP! SKIP! SKIP!..”

Typical Great Debates Denizen – “Bush is a big poopy head.”

Random Respnder – “You make some good points and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter.”

Ready29003 – “Look, idiot, if you can’t at least back up your arguments , then bugger off.”

Random Responder – “WTF?”

Ready29003 – “Sorry, I was responding to the other guy.”

Random Responder – “What other guy?”

<Five minute wait while Ready2003 listens to other snippets of conversation – maybe goes to the bathroom>

Ready29003 – “You know, the guy who said Bush is a poopy head.”

Multiple People – “WTF?” (because Random Responder moseyed off long ago to another forum.)

So basically you have an unmoderated, non-linear, time-delayed conversation where you don’t even have the normal CB radio benefit of knowing that everyone is on the same page as you. I don’t see this as rich and compelling. More like trying to carry on a conversation in a noisy bar with drunk people.

23

Wow this place really drips of cynicism.

Yes sometimes people have accents and other quirks in spoken communication. But that’s part of the fun of it. You get to learn and appreciate things about people that you can’t through text only.

In response to Uncivil: you could skip messages by saying “skip”. You could ignore all posts by a particular person by saying “ignore all” or something like that. It would be pretty much like reading through a thread. You read the first few sentences…and skip the rest if you feel like it.

I love me Vol 1. Thank you for contributing a little sanity to this discussion. 

Etherman: I know you guys don’t want it, but I REALLY do want to hear the voices of the people I am communicating with. I am getting sick of knowing so many people through text only.

Also, I really think everyone is exaggerating the need for sorting and indexing all the conversations. If you just imagine a café with 4 rooms for different types of discussion: General questions, IMHO, Café society, and MPSIMS. You simply walk into a room and start browsing the latest discussions to see if anything interests you. That is what it could be like to start with.

As for XXXXX.

Except for the spam and the way you made your example non linear, I enjoyed your dialogue.

If people don’t speak clearly, then other people will simply tell them so. Just like in here, if you don’t write clearly, people will tell you.

It doesn’t have to be totally un-moderated. The minimum level of moderation would be to ban users who post ads or purposely disrupt conversation.

Also, I don’t know why you call it non linear. You would always begin following a thread by listening to the OP. You would then listen to replies chronologically and reply to posts that lay along a path you have followed-just like a normal text based message board.

If the board owner wanted to keep the quality of discussion up, he or she could always make strict rules and ban people who violated them-just like a normal text based message board.

Thanks everyone for the discussion and feedback!

24

They already have a moderated version of what you describe. It’s called talk radio. And even with a dedicated staff screening calls and cutting people off when they wander too far off track, it’s pretty hard to get anything resembling an interesting conversation going. Since a moderator of your board would have to listen to every conversation in real time, you’d need about as many moderators as users, all working around the clock. Deleting messages would confuse any later listeners, as you’d have people responding to something that never happened. Lastly, without a quote function, can you imagine how many conversations would devolve into “I never said that!”, “yes, you did!”?

Let’s not even talk about an unmoderated version of this. Turning something like Usenet into a big group discussion would be exactly what I imagine crazy sounds like. Finagle’s excellent post didn’t even begin to scratch the surface…

I’m not being trying to be negative, it’s just that your idea sounds really stupid to me even if it did somehow work, which it wouldn’t. :slight_smile:

25

Cynicism? It reads like constructive criticism to me.

I don’t think anyone is saying that there is no merit in your idea, just that in the form you have described it is not a practical proposition.

26

I am not complaining about the critical comments. I guess it is a matter of opinion whether some of them were also “negative and pessimistic”.

But, I disagree with your assesment that the idea is impractical as described. I haven’t heard anyone voice a really difficult obstacle that would prevent a useable product as I describe being developed.

Speech is slower and less effecient than text, but people continue to speak to one another every day. Many people enjoy it.
Bandwidth and storage would be factors, but they are getting cheaper all the time.

It would definately take some tender loving care and tweaking to make this work, but that is how it is with everything.

27

Speech is far more efficient than text when you are talking one on one, or in small groups. Text is far more efficient when dozens or hundreds of people are communicating.

Have you ever been to a meeting where ten people are trying to make their opinions heard? Its a complete nightmare.

28

Yes I have and that is one of the main inspirations for this idea. I want some of the pleasure of live voices-without the many negative aspects of large live meetings you mention.

In a live meeting you have to:

  1. Schedule around the meeting time.
  2. Travel to the location for the meeting.
  3. Listen to people who have diarrhea of the mouth.
  4. Fight to have your voice heard.
  5. Compact what you have to say into a time span that might not be adequate.

A voice enabled forum would give you a live spoken discussion, without any of the above negatives. That is what I am really going for.

Matt

29

What are the quantifiable benefits of this over a messageboard like this one? How will it save us money, or time?

30

Apart from being able to hear people’s voices reading their posts, how would your idea be any different/better than using voice recognition software to interface with existing text message boards? A voice recognition program on your computer could read messages to you, skip through them with user-defined commands, and compose and post new messages.

This would allow people to interface with message boards however they wanted and be infinitely cheaper and easier to manage than a voice-only board.

31

There are basically 2 things I find appealing about this idea.

  1. It would enable the convenience of message board communication- yet while using spoken communication. I enjoy hearing tone, color, inflection, and emotion of real live human voices over a computer translating text.

  2. Convenience. I could interact and communicate with people over a voice message board while doing other things. The main time I would use it would probably be while driving. But I could also do it while washing dishes, working in the yard, laying in bed, sitting on the sofa, cleaning my house, etc etc. At any moment I had a question or idea I wanted to discuss with new and intelligent people, I could stop what I was doing for a moment-and for example-use my hands free pocketpc cell phone (a theoretical possession) to post my question or idea-and then continue what I was doing, listen to replies, reply, etc… Eventually, it would be nice if I could just do this with a bluetooth headset-so I could very easily roam freely around my property while talking to people. But for now, I would be happy just to be able to use something like this while driving to and from work.

32

  1. This is as far as I can see the only advantage to your idea. For me, it’s not an advantage, as I don’t have any interest in hearing people’s voices, but I can see how others might like it.

  2. You’re talking about the convenience of a remote voice interface to the Internet, which is pretty undeniable. However, I don’t see how that is specific to your application – if we had this technology, it seems like it would be more efficient to instead connect to your home computer, which could then translate text to/from speech for you with voice recognition software, rather than connecting to some remote server and storing all the audio data there.

33

A remote voice interface to the entire Internet is a huge challenge and opens up totally new problems.

I am talking about an Internet based communications application that is feasible right now. It lends itself perfectly to a remote voice interface. It could perhaps be an application an open source community could build upon to begin accessing other parts of the internet using voice. For example, you could easily add a voice based google search or news search.

But all I am talking about right now is a voice based message board. It could be made right now. It could be totally navigated by voice remotely-while doing virtually anything. It would be very cool, very fun, very natural-since you would be using real voices instead of text or computer speech… It would be a fun, useful, and convenient way to converse with people all over the world.

34

I’ll have to grant you that if your idea were fully realized, it would be convenient in the sense of available anywhere without lugging around a PC. But to me it would not be fun and I don’t believe it’d be user-friendly enough to be useful.

I’m not just trying to rain on your parade. I’m generally an early adopter of new technology and have a very open mind. But my pragmatism overrides all the rest.

35

Actually, I was talking about a remote voice interface to a computer. It could either be your own computer, which could then connect to the Internet, or it could be directly to a remote computer. Still very challenging, but not quite the same thing as a voice interface to the “entire Internet.”

OK, but who, exactly, are you calling when you are in the car talking to this thing? Presumably, the audio data is stored on a computer somewhere. How do you connect to that computer, to hear messages and leave new ones?

Unless I’m missing something (very possible), your idea:

  1. Requires you to sit in front of your computer with a microphone plugged into your sound card (at which point, you might as well just use voice recognition software to interface with existing message boards)

  2. Requires infrastructure similar to existing voicemail systems in which you would connect directly to the message board. This would be very expensive.

  3. Requires developing a remote voice interface to a computer, probably yours, which would then transfer files back and forth to the voice message board over the internet.

Are you talking about one of these three choices, or am I missing something? Your last post makes me think you’re talking about #2, in which case you’re right – the technology already exists. However, there are few applications which can support the costs involved – the only one I’ve ever heard of is “adult chat rooms” where you pay $2/minute to chat with hot single women in your area (women are of course free). They never really took off, although my sister’s roommate used to have a good time playing with one in college, leaving random guys messages pretending to be a hot blond nympomaniac.

36

Hey, we’ve come full circle! I think I pretty much explained this in the OP. I describe exactly what I envision and what technology I think should be used. A decent programmer could build this using a client application and running a MySQL database on a server. The largest cost would be in storage for the audio files and bandwidth for uploading and downloading data. All of which is getting cheaper everyday.

I envision the most enriching way to use this technology is while driving. You could have a bluetooth headset connected to a pocketpc phone or notebook computer.

37

Well, this at least is true. You’d be enriching the tow truck drivers, auto mechanics, and probably not a few morticians. People who are driving should be concentrating on the road, not on browsing some messageboard, verbally or otherwise.

38

In terms of danger and distraction, it would be the equivalent of having a conversation with other people in the car. Most people seem to be able to do that without crashing.

39

Hey you are forgetting one thing. Even if this idea takes off, there will be thousands just like you asking a question in real time. Either your question gets queued or played out at exactly the same time is was asked
If it gets queued the scenario would be something like this:
I asked a question when driving to work; I get my replies when Im busy in a meeting with my boss discussing my increment or something else as important.

Imagine the questions a typical visitor to this service will have to hear in real time if its not queued…total chaos the moment you enter a room… Assuming you have a room for a particular type of question. Also people wont just sit around in a room waiting for someone to ask a question unless it was a preset time to discuss on a particular topic. They will want to move a more active room. Active room means more people asking questions or answering them …which means lesser importance to what you have to say at that very time.
One of the benefits of text based forums is that people reading it give their full attention to the question and answer it without any distractions. Its highly possible for a person to be invloved in 2 separate conversations when talking in real time.

Anyways these were my 2 cents from what Ive read so far… Hope it helped.

:rolleyes: