A
aceperry
Guest
This location based audio app promises to be "a free worldwide service that allows anyone to create and share audio information."
Based on entries called "echoes", any user can record audio about a place or event, upload to the woices website with a photo and text if desired. You can upload a related series of echoes and group them together as a "walk." When you start the app, it looks up your location and displays echoes nearby. You can set the maximum distance from your location to get echoes from, and set the measurement as either kilometers or miles. The measurement setting didn't seem to have any effect on distance because everything was displayed in metric.
Although a pretty new service, with very few locations, this app would appeal to fans of geomapping and location based services and depends on crowdsourcing for most of it's data. There is a paid part of the service which allows organizations to feature information about their locations such as museums or other places of interest.
The service can be accessed from the web as well as the phone. The app's interface needs some work. It has an annoying habit of turning off the audio when you change the orientation of the phone. The UI is also a little crude and unintuitive. When moving around, there were some screens that promised more than one echo, but I was only able to get at the first one. This was mainly in the "Sponsored guides" (paid) and may have been due to the setup and design of the backend.
Echoes by normal users were easily accessible though. Because of its source for data, there is a large range in audio quality and content. Some echoes are just music, there was one echo where a guy was griping about the location, and another echo that was just the recording of a phone company's wrong number message.
One of the strengths and weaknesses of the service is that you'll have entries from all over the world, in many different languages. Even when I set the default to English, the service sent echoes from all different languages. The app could use some translation service which might help its usefulness.
Overall, an interesting app that lacks data, but has the potential to become useful and will appeal to people that are into travel or geo/location apps.
Pros:
-Potential for interesting info
-Can be a fun app for geo and location enthusiasts
Cons:
-Slow service, even on a landline based web browser
-Not much data right now
-UI needs a little work
Based on entries called "echoes", any user can record audio about a place or event, upload to the woices website with a photo and text if desired. You can upload a related series of echoes and group them together as a "walk." When you start the app, it looks up your location and displays echoes nearby. You can set the maximum distance from your location to get echoes from, and set the measurement as either kilometers or miles. The measurement setting didn't seem to have any effect on distance because everything was displayed in metric.
Although a pretty new service, with very few locations, this app would appeal to fans of geomapping and location based services and depends on crowdsourcing for most of it's data. There is a paid part of the service which allows organizations to feature information about their locations such as museums or other places of interest.
The service can be accessed from the web as well as the phone. The app's interface needs some work. It has an annoying habit of turning off the audio when you change the orientation of the phone. The UI is also a little crude and unintuitive. When moving around, there were some screens that promised more than one echo, but I was only able to get at the first one. This was mainly in the "Sponsored guides" (paid) and may have been due to the setup and design of the backend.
Echoes by normal users were easily accessible though. Because of its source for data, there is a large range in audio quality and content. Some echoes are just music, there was one echo where a guy was griping about the location, and another echo that was just the recording of a phone company's wrong number message.
One of the strengths and weaknesses of the service is that you'll have entries from all over the world, in many different languages. Even when I set the default to English, the service sent echoes from all different languages. The app could use some translation service which might help its usefulness.
Overall, an interesting app that lacks data, but has the potential to become useful and will appeal to people that are into travel or geo/location apps.
Pros:
-Potential for interesting info
-Can be a fun app for geo and location enthusiasts
Cons:
-Slow service, even on a landline based web browser
-Not much data right now
-UI needs a little work