The Coolest iPhone App that may Never Be

Check this out.   An iPhone App that injects cool, short, funny sound clips into your phone conversations in real time at the touch of a button.  Think, “auditory emoticons”, that liven up your conversations on the fly.

Like all my “inventions”, I suspect I’m not the first to think of it, but since I came up with it completely independently, I’m giving myself permanent invention credit…at least in my universe.  

Just launch the app. Then, during your phone call, at any moment you could press any one of the icons, and the app would immediately feed the corresponding sound effect directly into the phone conversation.    Not out of the your speaker which would sound like crap, but digitally inFUZED into the call.  Crisp and clear.

Think of the possibilities!    

Say, you’re on the phone with your best friend, and (s)he’s once again bitching and moaning, throwing him/herself a real pity party.  Well, queue the Violins!!   

Laughs ensue.  

Trying to be funny, but bombing?   Insert your own studio audience laugh track. Problem solved.    About to share some big news?  Drumroll!   You get it.   

Think of the funny voicemails you could leave.

Wouldn’t all that be cool??   Imagine all the times you could have used an app like this to drive home your point, and/or liven up your conversation.  Or, used another way, every phone conversation becomes more like a studio podcast, but engineered on the fly.    Something entirely new!

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to the little short sound bits, you could also deploy, before your call ever began, a continuous background sound bed to be layered right below your voice conversation for the duration of the call.     This twist is inspired by the old “excuse booth” I used to see at Dave & Buster’s gaming arcades.   (They may still have them… I’m not sure).  Anyway, the excuse booth was a sound-insulated pay telephone booth in a corner of the arcade that had an overhead speaker through which you could play one of several background sounds, such as “Office”, “Airport”, “Hospital”, “Sporting Event” –or whatever– that would lend cred to the story you were making up for you mother, spouse, or boss about where you were, presuming that you weren’t supposed to be at Dave & Busters to begin with.   Same idea.  Once this app was on the loose, I’ll bet attendance at strip clubs would skyrocket.  Haha!

I am sure this is an app that would go crazy viral, particularly with tweens, teens and twenty-something’s, as friends tried to out-do each other with their creativity.  It might get friends to actually talk on the phone a little more, rather than just texting. 

Use in Business, too

Pitching a webcast to a large group?  Maybe you could play with a few sound effects to liven up your pitch.    Or, let’s say you are by profession a motivational or career coach, or you provide anxiety counseling by phone to a list of clients.   Maybe there are certain musical sound beds you could play under your conversation that were inherently motivating, inspiring, or soothing.   Hmmm??

Want more sounds?

Of course, the app would come with enough sound bits and sound beds to get you hooked, but you could always add more by visiting the app’s online EFX Store where thousands of aural emoticons and sound beds awaited your purchase.

A cool, fun little app for sure, right?   Certainly worth putting out there to see who bites.    

So, Why Won’t this App Ever See the Light of Day??

 Well, it turns out that Apple’s iPhone Application SDK carefully shields the in-call voice stream from being accessed by third party applications.   I presume this is to preserve the integrity and security of the voice communication between parties.   The Phone app is first and foremost about secure voice communication after all, including emergency and 911 calls, and its corruption by shoddy or unscrupulous developers could raise all kinds of liabilities and downstream problems for Apple and its customers.   And, although I haven’t looked into it, I’ll bet the droid platform imposes similar limitations.    

Too bad, I would have had a lot of fun with this.

There’s always voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology that bypasses the phone carrier, and makes calls using the phone’s wifi connection.   This sound effects feature could be added to an existing VoIP app,  but so few people use VoIP, and one has to pay new incremental fees and all for a VoIP access, that the VoIP route just doesn’t seem to be worth it.   It would never go viral.   Maybe somebody can figure out a way around this, or Apple or one of its competitors will soften the armor around the Phone app without compromising consumer safety or privacy.  If you do figure out a way to pull this off, call me.  Let’s talk.  I’ll know its you by the laugh track!

 –Jeff   

Think this is cool?  Want more original ideas like this?  I got a million of ’em.  All original.    Subscribe to me via your preferred  option.  Twitter, email link to the right.  Whatever.   Share this on your facebook page.   Post it on Apple’s.   Jump up and down.    I got more ideas than I can even get to.