RebelVox is a company founded on the practice of asking core questions about the assumptions that we all make about our human to human communication systems. Humans need to (and mostly like to) communicate with each other. This takes varied forms that have all changed over centuries through the evolution of technology: speaking (the original form), writing, printing, the telegraph, the telephone, the communications radio, the internet, VoIP and so on. They have evolved in form while the technologies that support the forms have changed radically.

This blog is a forum in which we will describe, discuss, and explore some of the guiding principles and questions that have driven our development process. To see more about who we are, our products, and company information, please go to www.rebelvox.com.

Let’s Talk Voice

As we thought about voice communications we found that we learned a lot when we separated the application (how it works for the participant) from the transport (how the content gets from one participant to another). In doing this we have discovered that while we have gotten much better at how we move voice from place to place, the voice “application” has not changed all that much.

In March of 1876, Bell transmitted the first clear words using a “telephone” system. The assumptions were simple: two people on two ends of a wire speaking together in real time. These constraints formed the definition of the user experience: for Sam to speak to Sally, Sam needed to call Sally, possibly interrupt her, get her attention and then they could speak together in what we call “real time”, transmitting their voice messages over the wire between them. There wasn’t any other way to make non-local voice communication work.

As it turns out, even today, most voice communications, whether on telephones, cell phones, communication radios, or VoIP, make application assumptions and transmission assumptions that are still constrained by those simple principles.

Asking the hard questions about why and how it could be different, is the core guiding principle behind RebelVox.

There are several themes in our research:

• Time – in its abstract sense and in a human sense
• Human Efficiency – how we can improve the experience
• Context – how to have communications retain their contextual meaning
• Telephony and VoIP – why and how they are the same, and how they could change
• Tactical Radios – how they fail to be what they need to be