Well done, @alexandrabenet and team. The contextual bits of info (e.g. the caller's birthday) that you describe the in video below, is a nice touch and reminds me of Refresh's pre-meeting notifications.
What other types of information do you provide (or plan to add in future versions of the app)?
Hi Ryan! Nice to meet you.
The contextual information we show today in the Contact Card and Incoming Call screen is:
“Today is his/her birthday” , “Yesterday was his/her birthday” , “His/her birthday was 2 days ago" (up to 7 days)
“Last call 2 days ago” (up to 7 days)
We are planning to add Anniversaries and Life Events.
Also, before you call someone that is in another part of the world, we will test adding a reminder letting you know that it is late at night there (only if they are sharing their location with you).
We are also thinking of adding when someone is visiting or moved to your city (also only if they are sharing that info with you).
Our goal is to give people meaningful info so they know how to answer a call and to prompt conversations.
Thank you for the question :)
My ancient landline had caller ID, something that should be built into iOS and Android, imho.
h/t @joshconstine for this one. Here's his TC article.
P.S. ironically, another app named Hello is also on Product Hunt today. 😃
Hello's business use cases are particularly interesting considering Facebook's recent launch of Business for Messenger, potentially competing with Path Talk and expa's unreleased Operator. You have a lot of interesting opportunities here, @alexandrabenet. 😄
Contactive (http://contactive.com/) has been doing this for years but with multiple data sources, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp and more. Arguably, their access to Facebook data is gonna be impacted by the changes in the Facebook Graph API 2.0, where you can't access friends data unless they also use you app.
Also, Google released this as part of Android Lollipop (https://support.google.com/nexus...)
For iOS this would be pretty much impossible given the restrictions in the APIs. Using the Contactive API (http://developer.contactive.com/) I built a prototype for iOS. You could see info of the caller without having it in your contacts, using the native caller screen, but it was a total hack and the experience was suboptimal.
In any case, Facebook is only going to care about this app to the extent they can extract data from users, not necessarily caring about the value it provide to their users. Since they are not going to tap in other data sources, they are limited to a younger and casual market and they will miss the real opportunity, the enterprise.
For these reasons, I don't see this app going too far.
i just installed it and I really like it. It looks very identical to the stock android dialer.
I also like the face that I no longer have to manually search for unknown callers on facebook.com.
A popular friend of mine would often get girls insist that they exchange phonenumbers. He entered them into his phonebook and assigned names. One day, his phone lay on the table, rang and I almost died laughing, when on the screen it said that 'DO NOT ANSWER' was calling.
Hello! My name is Alexandra and I’m the designer on the Hello app. I will be around for the next hour to answer any design questions about the app. I will try to get to as many as I can! Look forward to your questions!
I'm apparently missing the big deal on this one. My dialer (default) already pulls data on numbers, so the only advantage would be cell phones that people have synced with Facebook. The calls via VOIP are cool but for the most part you can just do that via messenger.
Product Hunt