A more mobile, more resilient way to talk
We built Talko to be the best way for mobile teams to message and call, in one place. That sounds fairly straightforward. I mean, we all know what messaging is, and we all know what calling is. It sounds like we’re simply better-integrating them.
In practice, it’s a wee bit more complicated than that. Talko delivers a number of features that go beyond what we’ve known messaging or calling to be; features that are unique to the requirements of mobile scenarios. For example: the ability to “show while you talk”; and the ability to #tag, flag or bookmark recorded voice conversations for quick search, discovery and replay later on.
But much of our deepest technical investment is in our voice-over-IP infrastructure, a key part of which includes the things we do to account for the realities of mobile networking.
Products designed in the PC era could assume that the customer and their device (the PC) were stationary, with an attached ethernet cable offering low-variability connectivity. Talko’s design is mobile-first, so we started with a design assumption that the customer and their device (the phone) are non-stationary. We’re constantly communicating and getting things done, while on-the-go. We move from WiFi to LTE to 3G and back to WiFi in the span of minutes or even seconds. And, the unfortunate reality is that in 2015 it’s still common to encounter pockets of intermittent or sustained non-connectivity. In an age where the phone is the primary device, any app trying to provide the very best mobile experience must assume an extremely dynamic and variable networking environment.
With that as a key assumption, Talko’s user experience is designed to be as resilient as possible, across all those highly variable conditions. In any type of traditional call (whether cell or VoIP), you will readily drop from the call altogether when changing networks or when moving through bad cellular reception. This is a real pain because it forces you to re-initiate or re-join the call — a terrible hassle, particularly if you’re on-the-move and need to redial, remember the passcode, enter that passcode, etc.
In Talko, if you experience poor connectivity while LIVE in a call with others, we’ll assume that any outage is intermittent. You’ll disconnect and hear a tone to indicate that you’ve lost your connection. But, we keep trying to re-establish the connection in the background, all while leaving you ‘in the call’. If the network outage does turn out to be intermittent, you’ll automatically re-connect right into your call or team conference. The video below shows what you experience in the call when this happens. In this case, the user was on WiFi, they walked out of the office — at which point they transitioned off WiFi, went offline very briefly, and then ultimately connected to LTE. In the video, pay attention to the top and bottom of the screen. Note that audio has been removed from the video so as to protect the privacy of those who say top-secret things in our daily standup meetings:-). Notice the following:
- The mic closes when the connection becomes too poor to support LIVE audio. You remain in the call while we attempt to re-connect you to the conference in the background.
- The “Offline” label appears next to the mic when we detect you’re solidly offline and disconnected from our service. Additionally — at the top of the screen — you no longer see others as LIVE in the call with you.
- We automatically join you back into the team conference once iOS re-establishes a network connection. You’re brought back LIVE and your mic re-opens.
It all happens as quickly and seamlessly as possible, without you ever dropping out of the call. That’s the type of scenario that makes Talko uniquely-designed for the realities of mobile.
Similarly, in a scenario where you’re just trying to send a message, we’ll also do the most resilient, user-friendly thing. In this case, it’s not essential that we rejoin you to the call or conference, because it’s ‘just a message’ — nobody else is there LIVE. But what is essential is that we allow you to just keep on talking or typing while you’re offline. You can finish what you have to say, move onto whatever else you need to do, and rest assured that it’ll all just go once the device reconnects to the network. You never have to “try again” later. This video shows this scenario in a case where you go offline while sending a voice message. Notice that you’re able to just keep recording audio while offline — no data gets lost and there’s no need to stop what you’re doing and come back later. In this case, you’re able to complete the message while offline, close the mic, then see that the network connection is re-established and the audio is sent.
We’d love to hear what you think of these or any other capabilities in Talko.
