Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and Interactive Voice Response apps and servers are getting increasingly sophisticated.  It's easy to imagine a "voice web" which replicates most of the functions of a text web, and perhaps reaches certain types of users, communities, conversations, and content scenarios that weren't possible before.

If you've been working with social services, healthcare or other community efforts that ideally reach out to broad audiences, you immediately become aware of the limitations of Twitter, FaceBook etc.  Many of the people who are most in need of services will never in the course of a day (or year) log in to a text-based social media platform.  What do you do to reach out to them?

A phone-based social media platform might help address these needs.  IVR applications that work on a phone server don't require any special type of phone or programming on the phone itself.  Ordinary cell phones are much more ubiquitous than PCs or laptops in many target populations, and perhaps easier to distribute in cases where they aren't already available.  And of course they are small, portable, and socially acceptable.  (Many mobile monitoring devices for the eldlerly and people with dementia are obviously medical and hard to get people to wear regularly.)

Phone-based social media platforms could provide many of the same features as text-based systems.  You could set up "buddy systems" with virtual mailboxes to exchange voice messages within support groups; you could provide "voice blog" posts on specific topics, and information search based on keywords.  Voice-to-tweet functions would make it possble to merge voice and text conversations.

We'd love to learn more about programs that have been deployed that utilize voices systems to provide services or enable community.