Hey there!
Yosi here, CTO & co-founder of Yallo. I am excited to launch Yallo on ProductHunt and hope to get your feedback so we can keep making Yallo better.
In a nutshell, the current app is an over-the-top app that adds functionality to the boring old phone call.
Key current features mainly focus on effectiveness. They allow you to:
1. Go Yallo: be available on your regular phone number even when there is no cell reception (via WiFi). Traveling abroad? Work on the 49th floor? Receive calls for free.
2. Flex: be able to make any phone “your phone”, and have your number move with you regardless of where your SIM card is. Somewhat like gmail allows you to be available with your email address on any device.
3. Call Caption: let the person you are calling know what the context of the call is before they pick up.
4. For the Record: seamlessly record, replay and share your calls (soon you’ll be able to also search and retrieve recorded calls based phrases mentioned in the call.)
We created Yallo (there is a whole cloud based telephony platform behind it) as a voice communication platform that can serve as a platform for innovation and creativity to enrich voice communications and make it more relevant to the way we live today. Kind of like messaging platforms did to text messaging.
This is just the ‘first installment’ of Yallo functionality. Much more is coming. You can get a glimpse into the upcoming features, like group calls and calls that don’t disconnect on our website.
Unfortunately this version is only available for android devices. We are busily working on the iOS version, and it will be out real soon.
I am looking forward to hearing from you all. Happy to hear comments and thoughts, as well as ideas and suggestions on other features that can ‘liberate’ the phone call.
Feel free to ask me anything!
@yosit Looking forward to the iOS version! The "call preview" functionality will come in handy when coworkers like @oassoulin call me after hours so I can screen to see if it's beer/work related ;)
@oassoulin@thepaulcurran Absolutely - BTW we can also assign you more than one phone number so if a friend calls you on the personal line you will get it through after hours.
@yosit Exciting to see the old phone call get some love. Really like #'s 3 and 4 for work applications. It would be cool to integrate "For the Record" with CRM/note-taking platforms and include speech-to-text.
@gentrybrown it would be pretty easy - behind the scene it's a platform, we've built plugins for transcribing, voice changing, mood detection and much more. Integrating CRM would be a matter of a few hours of work.
@benln,
great questions. Apologies in advance if this is going to be on the long side...
Where it is coming from
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It started with our personal frustration with the fact that voice communication experience (aka 'the phone call') from a consumer stand point has barely changed since the phone was invented. We became wireless, and got caller id. But at the very fundamental level, what I can do as part of the phone call has not changed.
I truly believe that voice communications is essential to us as human beings. It does not replace messaging, but there are many things in life, emotional situation, conflict resolution, complex decision making and many others where voice interaction is much more suitable, effective, and efficient than messaging.
It struck us as absurd, that this is a mode of communication that has not been updated and as a result has become so out of sync with the way we work, live and communicate today.
Enough personal pain, huge industry and an opportunity for disruption... seemed like a challenge worth tackling.
How we built it:
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We started over 2.5 years ago. It was clear to us that we will have to develop an alternative telephony platform that is consumer focused and experience/function based rather than just switching and routing. And, that this will require non traditional approach (operators have been trying this for the last 15 years)...
We also believed that we must build an open network (i.e. that people can talk from Yallo to anyone, regardless if the other person is on Yallo).
So we started from the end objectives and imagined a new platform, with unique architecture that is at times orthogonal to the way tradition telephony is architected. We also imagined many lifestyle based experiences and functions that expand the boundaries of what is possible as part of the phone call today, to test them against this platform and prove to ourselves that the fit is there.
As soon as we had a basic platform we released an early product that was functionality poor, but did the job in terms of basic telephony in an open network setting, and have been marketing and supporting it for the last 18 months. There was an immense amount of learning and growth in that, in many aspects from call quality, operations, consumer behaviour and marketing/messaging.
All along we continued developing functionality and focusing on customer experience.
Once we had an initial cluster of functionality - we released our current product. You can see on our website the currently available features and the ones that are coming real soon.
Where is it going:
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We are planning to keep adding more functionality/experiences and keep pushing the boundaries of whats possible as part of a phone call. We are adding much more social features, and fun/play related features as well.
We are also adding more platforms soon - iOS and Web at this point.
We'd like to learn more through dialogue with our user community as it grows, on what they can imagine and would like to see next and leverage on these insights to build more relevant valuable voice communication experiences and applications.
Hi @milann , OnePlus is my main device - we do support it. Which country do you belong to on PlayStore? I'll be happy to forward you a link to the APK, shoot me an email to yosi@yallo.com .
Looks interesting enough, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the team can build over time. But at the current stage I fail to see how this is any different from Skype, Hangouts, Google Voice, Viber, etc. The main problem I have with the mentioned providers is the call quality when calling on 4G or WiFi. I have yet to find a provider that does this well.
So currently I've built my own simple system (allowing people to reach me on a local number in their country, no matter where in the world I am) with Plivo and that's the only solution I've found with acceptable call quality. Basically the call forwards to whatever local phone number I have wherever I am, and it's quite affordable in the end. By combining this system with Google Voice/Hangouts I can also receive and send text/calls when I don't have cell service.
Good luck guys, I hope you can nail this over time! (and hopefully your international coverage will improve over time too)
Hi, @tkrunning . We're using state of the art codecs and network management to make it better all the time. It's an ongoing effort. Internally we track every second of every call, running different algorithms and trying to figure our what is the best strategy to deal with network conditions. This is a hard one and we have improved immensely.
On your differentiation point, this is one of the most popular question we get. We are considering ourselves as an Over The Top OPEN network, it means that you don't need the other side to have Yallo in order to enjoy it. You are pretty advanced with the setting you've build and we would like to do the same thing for the average user. It should be super simple as a button press to get your calls to Yallo even when the other side doesn't have it. It should be cheap and beautiful.
I would be very much happy to talk to you along with @nerez our VP Product.
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