Voice Print

I was thinking today about conversations. I've definitely had the experience before of being in a conversation where the other person just talks and talks and you can't get a word in. But I've also had that feeling the other way, where I start to wonder if I've just been dominating a conversation with my thoughts and ideas. Obviously, I can just ask people I talk to, which is helpful to some extent, but in a sense I'm just swapping my opinion about the content of the conversation for theirs.

Since I like data, maybe it's a problem that can be solved with data. So here's an idea for an app called Voice Print, which allows one or more people to train it to recognise their voices. You then leave it to record, and it keeps track of who's talking and how much. At the end of the conversation you can get a summary with all sorts of neat information: who talked the most, who tended to respond to whom, how long the gaps in conversation were, how long did each person wait in a gap, how much quiet was there during the conversation. So much data.

Of course, you could do the same thing manually by just recording your conversations, but, ugh, manual labour. Plus I imagine people would be much more squeamish about you recording everything they say than just tracking the general flow of the conversation.