If you haven’t caught one of YouTube’s most recent viral videos – A Conference Call in Real Life – then you might be more surprised about the news that yet another conferencing solution, Voxeet, announced a $1.5 Million round of fundraising from Partech, Xavier Niel, and a handful of others. Since the adoption of WebRTC, there has been quite a number of “me-too”s looking to dethrone Skype’s status as the default video conferencing solution, including Google+ Hangouts & a handful of telephony-based solutions, and even Weemo, which I still don’t understand. So, why Voxeet?
First of all, Voxeet has got something that none of the other players have – having tried it out on a call with CEO Stephane Giraudie, I must say I’m impressed – and that’s audio quality. Voxeet makes one promise: no more choppy calls. The audio comes through clear, no matter what – and frankly, it makes a huge difference in the phone call. No more “can you repeat that?”s or calls that just never happen because one or both of the callers are unable to get to a reliable internet connection.
Today, the Voxeet app is free to download for iOS, Android & Windows, and includes a web version as well. Giraudie was also quite a fan of the ‘conference table’ interface that appears on all calls, that allows you to place all members of the call at different positions around that table, with their position relative to you determining the way you hear their voice, imitating a real-life conference table.
Giraudie says the app will remain free for the time being, and Voxeet will continue to develop services on top of the calling solution in order to monetize.
For now, I’ll be doing my next few phone call meetings on Voxeet to try it out some more, but I’m pretty excited at the idea of using neither Skype nor Google+ Hangouts.