Social media has transformed the internet. Facebook, the most popular social media portal, gets the second highest traffic on the internet. As of April 2015, an estimate of 350 million photos are uploaded on Facebook daily. That’s just one social media portal. There are many others like twitter, Reddit etc., and the overall number is far more than this.
But then, photos have one major constraint – they are confined to simple attributes like facial expressions etc. And for over one century, no one has seriously thought about adding more to way images are captured or are shared.
Now, there is an app called Voxweb, that lets a user put an 11-second audio clip to the image.
Why an 11-second voice clip?
There are two reasons for it. First, any human emotion, be it as simple as a laugh or as complex as joyous sound during a jump, can be efficiently captured within 9-10 seconds. There is a 2-second buffer to make sure that you don’t spend a lot of time with retakes. And, the second reason is to draw a distinction between an image and a video. A longer audio would increase the size of the file, and that in turn would make the file too large to share conveniently.
Why would social media giants want to integrate speaking pictures?
A speaking picture conveys a lot of emotions compared to a bare picture. Therefore, any such picture would garner a lot of fanfare. And it would become quite a phenomenon just like GIFs (Moving images). Many popular social media giants were once reluctant to embrace gifs, but subsequently, they did as the users had a better overall experience interacting with them. Talking strictly in terms of interaction, speaking pictures are a step ahead of gif images.
How do you differentiate a speaking picture vis-à-vis normal picture?
Since Voxweb’sspeaking pictures is a radically new concept, it has ensured that they look distinct than other pictures. To make it simple and easy to identify, the developers at Voxweb chose an orange line. So any speaking picture would have an orange line beneath. And once you see the orange line, you just need to click on the picture and it would speak out the underlying message.
Computers can’t take over some things – one of them is human emotions
In this age of technology, we can automate and computerize a lot of things, but what we can’t do perfectly yet is capturing human emotions. GIF’s are better than normal pictures, and speaking pictures are in a different league altogether.
Response: The true north of social media adaption
Individuals who have been using speaking pictures swear by it. Users across the globe are embracing it. This is akin to how users embraced WhatsApp over text messaging. If user adoption were to go by, then Voxweb can be easily dubbed as a rising phenomenon which social media would eventually adapt.
How does it Changes social media for you?
In numerous ways, for instance, now whenever you take a selfie on a trip to Paris, you can shout your emotions aloud and let it club together with the images. It would leave you with a memory of the lifetime. Currently, VoxWeb has made it a point to align things so smartly that a user doesn’t find it difficult to switch onto the new way of image sharing.
In the nutshell, Voxweb has devised a very simple and efficient tool for sharing images, and could soon be the Xerox of the segment of speaking picture. The founder of Voxweb, as well as their users, are upbeat about the promise it holds.