Voice - the synchronous complement to our async world of communications

There is a small article on GigaOm about the future of Voice being 'apps'.  It is somewhat content free, but it does, tangentially, make two interesting points

1. A Juniper study that sez. 80% of the VoIP users in 2016 will be doing it through apps on their smartphones
2. These apps are not necessarily specific 'phone' apps  (e.g., softphones)

Which pretty much ties in with a CounterPath blog post that made the rounds earlier  which pointed out that 

Softphones are really passé. They are a thing of the past. It’s all about endpoints that are device shiftable...communications has revolutionized itself through the hands of end users driven by technologies and innovations not in the plans of the legacy care takers of the telecommunications sector

Or, to put it differently, the focus is shifting away (at an increasing pace!) from soft-phones, and into various endpoints that happen to incorporate calling.

This is - obviously - particularly relevant to those of us in the communications biz. The world of communications is increasingly breaking down into a mix of asynchronous (e.g. email, IM, Facebook) and synchronous (voice, video) channels.  The two are different, but are also complementary.  You can - very poorly - emulate one with the other, but genuine value is provided by services that can allow users to seamlessly move across sync and async channels as their needs change.

Within this context, the 'apps' mentioned in the GigaOm article make sense - i.e., we will see more and more places where an async communication will be given the opportunity to go synchronous, as part of the user's behavior stream.  (Or, to translate, you can make a voice/video call as part of some existing asynchronous conversation, without going out of your way)

• Google+, where you can start a Hangout (video conferencing for the uninitiated) while live-blogging the latest Apple event
• Facebook, where you can skype your friend when you see the picture of their oh so cute cat
• SalesForce, where you can click-to-connect the level two tech into the support call that you are on now, while simultaneously chattering with the level 3 tech.

well, you get the picture...

Note:

I'm defining sync/async slightly differently from the common usage.  The key differentiator isn't whether the message gets there immediately, but whether the other party responds immediately.  If the other party on a phone call walks off to answer the door, you pretty much know it, but if the same happens in an IM chat, its pretty much understood...