A new smartphone app that blends voice conversations and images along with text messages can help you better share information with your friends.
Talko, a communication app, focuses on group calls which are recorded and stored by default.
Since calls are preserved, users 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.
Hashtags can be added to conversations so they can be searched by topic later on, and any member of a group can add audio messages to a discussion at another time, ‘MIT Technology Review’ reported.
Talko incorporates text and photos as well, allowing users to send written messages to others while an audio call is in progress or share photos immediately as they take them.
Talko was developed by Ray Ozzie, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, and two cofounders over the last two years.
In time, Ozzie hopes the app 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.