Voicegem joins Palantir!

Today, we are excited to announce that we are joining Palantir. 

We had an incredible ride during the past 8 months. Last June, days after we graduated, we dived into Y Combinator’s summer 2012 class. At first, we set about building a suite of simple online tools for the elderly. One of those tools was a voice based email service that quickly grew beyond our friends at the local senior houses. It became the alternative to a phone call for thousands of people of all ages. Folks ranging from families to language students, aspiring singers to podcasters and universities to businesses all used Voicegem to deliver almost a million seconds of voice recordings.

Over the past few months, we’ve gotten to know the Palantir team and discovered a shared hunger for solving the hardest, most pressing problems. Palantir is a deeply mission driven company and we’re incredibly excited to join forces with the talented and entrepreneurial engineering team there in order to take part in building a platform that we believe is truly changing the world. 

In the coming weeks we will be making the move to New York and winding down our services, as Palantir is not acquiring our product or the user data hosted on our servers. We will stop accepting new users; however, existing users can continue to use Voicegem until March 15th. 

We want to thank all of you, from our users and investors to our family and friends, who made this journey possible.

VoiceGem for Developers

We are excited to share developer.voicegem.com as a way for developers to integrate VoiceGem into their sites. Our first product is a voice feedback widget that can be embedded into websites with just a few lines of Javascript. It allows website visitors to leave voice messages in a frictionless manner.

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We have been truly overwhelmed by the response we’ve gotten so far, and are really excited going forward. Stay in touch for more soon!

Instant Sending (aka Streaming)

We’ve been hearing from folks that they had to wait quite a bit for uploading, after they recorded their voice messages on the web version of VoiceGem. We agree, no one wants to wait for another 5 minutes, to send a 5 minute long message.

Recently, we have been rolling out a new voice recorder for the web version. The new recorder streams your voice directly to the server, so that when you click “Send” your message will be sent in the blink of an eye. Enjoy!

Facebook integration

Today we launched our Facebook integration. VoiceGems can now be sent not only via email, but also to Facebook friends. Recipients get a private Facebook message from the sender with a link to listen and reply to the voice message. This feature is available both on the web and the iOS app. 

We are excited to be launching this new feature as it aligns with our vision of enabling people to send voice messages to anyone. We also want to thank all our users for their continued feedback that pushes us to release new features like this one.

Aug 2

Introducing VoiceGem

Today we publicly launched VoiceGem, the easiest way to send a voice message that we know of. It’s available at voicegem.com and the iOS App Store.

VoiceGem allows you to send voice messages to anyone. Enter any number of email addresses, record a message as long as you want and your gem will be delivered to your recipients’ inboxes. It’s a great way to stay in touch with friends and family, or check in with your users on a more personal level than email or text. 

VoiceGem grew out of our frustration with having to schedule telephone or Skype calls to hear the stories of our family and friends. They were asleep when we were up, or we were working when they were free. We needed a way to tell them about our lives when we had the time to do it. We tried email, but there was something missing. VoiceGem let us do exactly that.

Once we started sharing VoiceGem with friends, folks started using it for ways we had never thought of. Companies tell us that they now use it to check-in with their users, and the responses are much more positive than email. We are currently spending all our time to figure out the best possible experience for asynchronous voice communication, but this is an exciting area to consider going forward.

We are working on many new things that you will hear about soon. Your feedback is helping us tremendously as we shape the future VoiceGem and voice communication. Thanks for all your support!

Aug 2

Hello, world!

VoiceGem now has a blog. We will be updating this as we gather feedback, add features, and more. Feel free to check back soon.

In the meantime, you can always contact us at welcome@voicegem.com or by simply replying to the welcome message in VoiceGem.