Pinger: Twitter for voice?
by Imran Ali
Pinger’s been around a little while now, but just rolled out across the UK in recent days. The service enables users to send up to a five-minute voicemail for the price of a local call to other mobile numbers in around twenty countries.
Such a voicemail, or ‘pinger’ is created using IVR voice prompts for usernames, number entry and the message itself; the notion of a completely voice operated mobile messaging service is an appealing one and coupled with the immediacy and asynchronism of a ‘Twitter for voice’, Pinger is theoretically very appealing. It’s probably best explained by the brief How It Works video on the Pinger site.
Between Seesmic, Twitter and now Pinger - video, text and voice now collectively provide the collective capability for micro-blogging and status messaging in most of the formats that people would wnat to use (photos are missing of course and I don’t believe Seesmic is really mobile yet).
I’m not convinced that this type of asynchronous voice messaging is something that text-mad Brits will embrace or indeed whether the ethnographics of Twitter can apply to other media.
I do however find the use of voice UIs as appealing and a strong precedent. Unfortunately, the user experience of Pinger is appalling - three attempts to recognise the five letters of my name failed followed by the IVR’s inability to correctly identify the DTMF tones of the number I was trying to send to!
As such I was unable to test a service which shows promise and highlights what may come to be some emerging trends in user behaviour.
