Established communities like readers of The Wisconsin Times use  Zello as the place to come alive with voice.  To join in, search channels for wisconsin

The most recent update of Loudtalks Lite introduces new important feature — public talk channels. Public channels are open conversations between Loudtalks users, where as many as 100 people can participate at once. The concept is somewhat similar to Skypecasts, which were offered by Skype until discontinued in 2008.

Public channels are useful to:

1. Meet the new people from around the world
2. Discuss a topic with like minded strangers
3. Share and receive updates on important time-sensitive information (traffic situation in your area, stocks market etc)
4. Broadcast your status updates to interested followers (yes, like twitter)
5. Learn a new language

Connecting to existing channels

1. Use menu Tools > Add a channel…

2. Enter channel name or the keywords (you can try ‘lobby’ or ‘support’) and press Next

3. It’ll show the list of the channels found. Click on the desired channel name to select it and click Next

4. After confirmation screen the channel will appear in your contacts.

5. To talk to the channel, select it in the contacts and use PTT key as usual. Please note that some channels may be “read-only”.

6. Use right-click on the channel name to Connect or Disconnect the channel or setup Auto-connect, when you log in.

7. If you want to delete the channel from your contacts you can use Tools > Delete selected contact(s) menu command.

When receiving a message from a channel both user name and channel name are displayed. In Loudtalks history you can use context menu on the incoming message to add the user who sent it to your contacts with one click. We are building the directory of the channels available to make the discovery easier.

Creating and managing your own channel

Have something interesting to share with the world? You can create one or more channels yourself!

1. Use Tools > Create a channel… menu command.

2. Name your channel, add description, select the channel type and click Next.

It’s very important to write a good and detailed description — the keywords it includes can be used by others to find your channel. Include the language of your channel, and its location (for location-sensitive information) into description. You can either allow anyone to talk on the channel or make it broadcast-only so you can talk uninterrupted. In the later case you may want to create another channel specifically for comments and mention it in the main channel description.

3. If the channel name is available, it’ll be created, added to your contacts and available for others to join.

4. The person who created the channel becomes channel administrator and have additional functions available in the context menu on incoming message in the history.

To fight abuse the channel admin can block any user from accessing the channel (or unblock the user previously blocked).

Hope you’ll enjoy the new feature! It’s still an early version of it so please share your suggestions and feedback — either in comments here or via ‘support’ channel in Loudtalks Lite.

Update (May 12, 2010): Now you can browse the public channels online.

Are you a Twitter user? You can follow Loudtalks’s releases and “behind the scenes” updates at http://twitter.com/loudtalks then!

We decided that it would be cool to nominate Loudtalks for one of The Crunchies awards.

If you think we deserve it, please support us by clicking on that cheesy round button on the left and entering “loudtalks” into “Best Bootstrapped Start-up” category. You may nominate us into different categories as well :)

Thanks!

This is a second iteration of Deepwell experiment. The previous one (the attempt to use it as a test contact) was unsuccessful and resulted in a bunch of support emails, which sounded nearly schizophrenic: “…sometimes I hear voices, how do I hear myself?”

We let “echo” do what it’s supposed to do and moved Deepwell robot over to “voices” username. After a little modification now it could be used to meet new people in quite unusual way.

Here is how to use it:

1. Add “voices” to your contacts
2. Select “voices” in your contacts list, push F7 button and speak something about yourself for 5-20 seconds.
3. Release F7 button and hear the message from another user, which will be randomly picked up from the queue.
4. Watch the status line as it tells you, who was the author of the message you are hearing
   
5. If you like, what you hear, add the user to your contacts and as soon as he approves your request — you can talk!
6. Repeat steps 2-5 until as necessary :)

Since this feature is experimental and just launched you might notice that there are few messages in the pipeline. That’s normal and if anybody will find it useful, there will be many more interesting people to meet there soon!

(update 11/6/2007: Based on feedback from users, we replaced “DeepWell” build with a normal echo, which repeats back whatever you say to it. DeepWell moves over to “voices” username)

Today we launched the first bot in Loudtalks network. It’s name is “echovoices” and it’s added to all new users’ contacts automatically. You can add or remove it manually too.

The first purpose of this bot is to help users testing Loudtalks themselves before inviting friends. It does that in somewhat unusual way. The best way to experience “DeepWell” project is to login to Loudtalks, add “voices” to your contacts and tell something to it.

If you just want a spoiler here is what it does.

Read the rest of this entry »