The notion of visual component as part of a voice conversation has been around for a long time, with video phone models having been pitched in the past.  With the advent of IP phones, a new wave of IP video phones came around: first, there were prototypes such as the LG model shown in the figure, and then with other models being introduced in the marketplace such as the IP video phone that Nortel sells in Asia/Pacific.  The cost-conscious consumers always had an option of a no-frills video phone, courtesy of a free download from Microsoft's Net Meeting application (or its popular predecessor, CuSeeMe) and a low-cost web cam. 

But the Technology Review blog had a really interesting entry yesterday on its Telecom/Internet section.  The article spoke about a new concept being developed at the world famous MIT Media Lab, called Visiphone.  This is definitely not a video phone, but rather a phone that displays abstract symbols that are supposed to represent sounds made by each speaker over time.  The product consists of a glass half-dome that goes on top of a small video projector.  When a participant starts talking, a colored circle appears at the center of the dome, and as the chat progresses, that circle begins to spiral out to the edge of the cone.

Quite abstract concept, but could there be any applications?  One that I could think of would be a Visiphone for hearing-impaired people.  But there could be many features from this product that can be incorporated, for instance in an audio conferencing desktop unit.  For instance, a low-end embedded speech recognition device can be added and with it, there could be a timer that would keep track of how much each conference participant talked.  The speech recognition chip would first take a few voice prints and then be able to identify when a speaker changes.  The information (e.g. data such as length of time taken up by each participant) could be visually displayed (in a bar chart format), and updated in real-time.  This could be useful, particularly for the folks that sometimes take up all the bandwidth on such calls, or for those people that tend to fall asleep or think about their weekend plans...