New User Experience for Voice

The telephone is broken. Receiving a call is intrusive and generally inconvenient, and then dealing with voicemail is cumbersome and inefficient. Text messaging and email help with these problems, but human beings still want to talk to each other. More powerful mobile devices and faster packet networks give us the building blocks to fix the user experience, but without a new application we are left with the same problems. We would like to challenge the audience with some ideas from our research and development:

• You should be able to use your device to say something to another person without waiting for that personʼs attention or any network resources.

• Both live and non-live voice can be handled by the same application.

• Incoming voice can be paused and then played faster to catch up.

• It is possible to participate in multiple ongoing voice conversations at the same time using the same device.

• Voice can be like email where everything you say and hear on your device can be recorded and indexed for subsequent search and review.

The days of dial-up Internet access are gone, and now is the time to move beyond "dial-up" voice.