The Apple Watch will either be the next big thing in wearable devices or a passing fad, but plenty of backend communications services stand to benefit from the users that have spent part of this week learning what they can do with their Apple Watches.
Among those service providers is Voxer, which this week launched Voxer for Apple Watch, a cloud service through which users can gain access to text, photo and voice messages.
While Voxer is accessible from most any device, Voxer president Irv Remedios says one of the more intriguing opportunities that Apple Watch will present is the ability to leverage Apple’s Siri to transcribe voice-to-text. In the future, Remedio says Voxer expects Apple to expose even more voice-related application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable the Apple Watch to deliver functions that have been often compared with the “Dick Tracy” two-way communications wristwatch.
Voxer for Apple Watch also gives users access to both individual and group chats, and with Apple’s “Handoff” feature, users can seamlessly move the conversations being held on their watch to their iPhone.
The Voxer service itself comes in a freemium version and a professional edition for users who want to take advantage of additional Voxer services. Given that it will probably be some time before internal IT organizations add support for the Apple Watch to the communication services they deliver, chances are that Apple Watch aficionados will be invoking shadow IT services like Voxer to turn those Apple Watches into something more useful than just another status symbol or cool gadget.