Say what you type! Say2GO.

Say2GO is a ‘next-generation’ instant messenger. Along with the typical messaging and smiley, it does much more, which other IM clients don’t do at the moment ( which makes it next-generation! ). It also has a unique horizontal interface with cover flow for contacts which makes it look really cool, although it’ll be great if they increased the measurements of their application, as it all seems to small sometimes. And along with it’s own IM platform, it supports ICQ too, with support for more coming soon. We gave Say2GO a try, read more for the full review.

The Interface

These are the screenshots of the interface before and after signing in. The login windows is nice and different then other IM’s due to it’s horizontal orientation.  Since I have contacts at the moment, it just shows my picture at the moment. The smiley at the top shows your mood and status. The drop down menu contains lots of different smileys for different moods and a wide range of status icons, which are a welcome change from the personal message options that every other IM has nowadays. But there should be an option for text statuses not the less. ( In case you’re wondering, the smiley in the picture shows that my mood is deprecative at the moment.)

Clicking on a contact opens up the chat window right in the main program itself, so you wont get crowded with multiple windows at all. Because of this, Say2GO offers a tabbed interface for chat windows. But when you close chat windows, strangely, the application shifts itself to the right of the screen. We don’t know if it’s just us who are experiencing this, but it sure gets annoying. And we were also expecting some swift animations after seeing that this application has a coverflow contacts UI and is very pretty in general. But we’re disappointed to say the least with the lack of eye candy.

The Features

It differs itself through the voice capabilities it offers, such as voice messages for instant or future delivery. Yes, we also wonder why would anyone want to use voice messages and not VOIP for instant delivery of messages. From their website:

You select your buddy and, instead of typing your message, you can just push-to-talk to say your message. By default, you do push-to-talk by pressing and holding the space bar, even though other keys can be configured for this functionality as well.

Say2GO delivers your voice message to your buddy and lets him/her listen to it immediately or at their convenience. It also saves the message in searchable history for future reference. More importantly, Say2GO also seamlessly converts what you’ve just said into text, so your party receives a regular text message from you. It’s that simple. If he or she is also interested in listening to the original voice message, it can be replayed. Even when the accuracy of recognition isn’t 100%, it’s usually well enough for the recipient to understand what the message is about, and be able to do a text search through the history on a later date. The recognition accuracy gets tremendously improved if you train your computer just once to your voice and specifics of your audio system, by following the standard Windows wizard launched for you by Say2GO. Your computer memorizes your voice profile and uses it later on in Say2GO and other Windows applications.

Coming Features

There is a lack of integration of other IM services so far, as ICQ is the only one available apart from Say2GO’s own platform. But they’ve got more IM companies listen in their coming soon features. They’re also working on a vertical layout for businesses. Although we’d recommend them to work and improve on their horizontal layout which is an awesome potential waiting to be exploited.

• Scheduling a message to be sent at a certain time/date rather than immediately (useful for greetings, reminders, etc.)
• Correcting the text recognized from voice before sending. The correction result will be sent back to the speech recognition profile of the user to help improve accuracy
• Adding "voicies" - a voice analog of text smileys ( Yahoo’s IM already has this feature, and Windows Live Messenger’s Winks can serve the same purpose too)
• Integration with other IM networks (already partially implemented)
• The next major addition will be the long-awaited business layout of Say2GO supporting business conference calling (similar to push-to-talk but with great added benefit of preserving the entire voice conversation AND recognized text in messengers’ history). This enhanced archiving capability directly caters to the only remaining deficiency of IM on its way to replace business email
  

Verdict

We don’t like the fact that they’re touting the push to talk feature to differ themselves as it’s already available in Windows Live Messenger called Voice Clips. And the robotic voice isn’t really interesting, we’d go for voice chat anytime over the speech engine. Say2GO has many other things which are better then what normal clients do, and we’d love to see them improve on that, and possibly more on VOIP then on speech recognition, as that feature wont really pull many followers judging by the high amount of users on Skype. But still, the good execution of speech capabilities can catapult them into popularity and huge subscriber base. We’ll keep an eye on the improvements they make.

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