Spokn for Android is our first mobile dialer to feature our O-VoIP technology (which means it works in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and other middle-eastern countries). Even better, the app supports calling via VoIP, Call-through and Callback mechanisms, so you will always have access to Spokn’s amazing rates to make calls even when you don’t have access to the Internet.

Spokn runs in the background so you can receive calls (even Collect calls) on the go. You can even send and receive VMSes to your phone book contacts or practically anyone.

Download it for free from the Android Market.

Hope you enjoy using Spokn for Android. Do let us know your feedback!

We’ve thought of a Collect call feature that allows them to do just this – instead of they paying to call you, we use your Spokn credits for the same. We need feedback from you on whether you would like to make use of this facility – or not.

In short,

When you call your favourite contacts, Spokn displays a unique USA phone number as your caller ID. Whenever they want to call you back, they just give a missed call to this USA phone number and Spokn automatically calls them back and connects them to you.

The long version

1. You activate the Collect call service on the Spokn website (free)
2. You provide up to 5 phone numbers of your favourite contacts. Spokn allocates a USA phone number for each of these contacts.
3. When you call these contacts using Spokn, they see a call from a USA (+1 country code) phone number. You ask them to save this number. Each of your 5 contacts will see a different USA phone number, so they will each need to save it separately.

To call you back, your contacts just need to dial the USA phone number they got when you called them.

1. Spokn sees a call coming from your contact’s phone number and disconnects the call immediately without answering it. Your contact is NOT CHARGED by their operator for this international call.
2. Spokn then initiates a call to your contact’s phone number and once the call is answered, initiates another call to your Spokn ID, which rings on your Spokn dialer / device.
3. Once you answer the call, the conversation continues as usual and just like before, you are billed only for a call to your contact’s phone number (which you normally spend in any case)

If you are not online on Spokn, the call will be sent to your voicemail (billed like point 3 above). If you have enabled call forwarding, the call will be forwarded to your regular phone. Note that in case of forwarded calls, you will be billed for two calls – the call to your regular phone and the call to your contact’s phone number.

An example

You work in Dubai, UAE and your family’s in Kerala, India. You’ve enabled the Collect call service and your father has saved the USA number specific to him. Now -

1. He calls this number and Spokn disconnects the call immediately (he does not get charged for this)
2. He gets an incoming call from Spokn and answers the call. Spokn asks him to hold on while it connects to you.
3. You get an incoming call on the Spokn dialer, answer the call and talk to your father.

Spokn bills you at 1.5 cents / min since there’s a call that Spokn made to your father’s phone. This is what you would normally pay if you were to call your father directly.

In the scenario where you are offline on Spokn and the call is forwarded to your regular phone, Spokn will bill you at 17 cents / min + 1.5 cents / min (effectively, 18.5 cents / min) since it’s calling you on your Dubai phone and your father on his India phone.

Tell us if you like it

So, what do you think of this service? Would you want to use something like this? Help us decide by taking this poll, or talk to us in the comments section.

India – Now 1.5 cents / min (reduced 25%)

Pakistan – Now 4 cents / min (reduced 50%)

China – Now 1.5 cents / min (reduced 25%)

Singapore – Now 1.5 cents / min (reduced 25%)

Great quality calls at great prices with Spokn!

If you are a Spokn Reseller and you recharge for USD 100 or more, you get a bonus of USD 10 instead of the regular USD 5!

With the proven new dialer that works flawlessly in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and other countries in the Middle East, we’re sure that you’ll have the happiest customers. So recharge soon to get the Double Bonus – this offer expires on February 15, 2012.

Wish you a prosperous and happy new year!

At Spokn, we have been working hard to come up with a solution that works well for callers from the Middle East, most of whom are in Dubai. With version 3.0.0 of the Spokn Windows dialer, we’ve finally cracked the problem and we’re calling this technology O-VoIP, short for “Obfuscated VoIP”. Essentially, we make the VoIP traffic look different so that the rules that the ISPs have implemented on their firewalls don’t catch our VoIP data.

Many people subscribe to expensive VPN services to make VoIP calls. But in countries like Oman, even VPN connections are blocked. Also, making VoIP calls through a VPN will result in worse voice quality since the data has to go through yet another network, adding latency and possibly, packet drops.

We are rolling out our O-VoIP technology on all our existing clients. The first one out will be our new Android dialer that should be available next week. The iPhone dialer will follow soon after.

Some customers have reported voice distortion issues with v3.0.0 of the Windows dialer – this is because their microphone volume is set too high. In the next release, we will be implementing Automatic Gain Control (AGC) so that microphone volume settings do not need to manually set.

If you haven’t tried Spokn yet, give it a shot. We’re committed to our customers in the Middle East and promise replies to all your queries within 1 business day.

We’ve quickly engineered a solution that relies on obfuscation of the VoIP stream and we’re thrilled to release it today. As an added bonus, we’ve tweaked the codec for improved voice quality. We’ve beta tested this with customers from different countries in the Middle East and all of them had very good things to say about it. So here it is – Spokn for Windows v3.0.0.

As always, do let us know your feedback and suggestions – it helps us make Spokn better for you.

Here’s wishing you all a wonderful new year! We have something exciting coming up for our Resellers and Android users, so stay tuned…

Update: Some users may experience voice distortion during calls. This is due to HIGH microphone volume. Please reduce the volume manually for now. We are working on an automatic mechanism for our next release.

For example, when a user in Oman was logging in using the experimental dialer, we noticed that the ISP was detecting the VPN tunnel being established and was blocking the connection. Apart from the first packet, nothing else was reaching the Spokn server. Clearly, the ISP in question was performing deep packet inspection before allowing packets through to the Internet! We believe the same is happening in certain other Middle Eastern countries as well and this has forced us to rethink our implementation.

We’ve quickly come up with a new solution which relies on obfuscation of the data that the dialer is sending. Since the data is obfuscated, the ISPs will not be able to detect a standard protocol ‘signature’ in the packets being generated by the dialer. This will also allow us to increase the voice quality by using higher-quality codec bit-rates as will hopefully not be restricted by speed throttling tactics implemented by ISPs.

Yet again, if you are in the Middle East, we need your help to validate our assumptions and to verify that our new implementation works well for you. So please write in to us at support@spokn.com if you can help us make Spokn better for you and others like you.

We’re already field-testing the upcoming version of the Windows Dialer. We’re quite excited about that release since the Dialer features inbuilt VPN support. With that dialer, Middle-East residents who are unable to use any VoIP service without a VPN service subscription will be able to make great quality low-cost calls with Spokn. No more clunky VPN to use and no more monthly VPN subscription costs!

In case you would like to help us test it out, just drop us an email at support@spokn.com with “Beta testing” in the subject line.

As part of the overhaul, we made logins instantaneous and reduced the data usage even more while keeping the same level of quality. Now Spokn will work well even if you have a low speed internet connection.

At the same time we’ve made sure that Spokn continues to work well even in restricted environments. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

To be able to use this service, you just need to register your mobile number in the Spokn settings page and have some Spokn credits in your account. This service uses the Click-to-call API to set up a phone-to-phone call for you, so you are billed for two Spokn calls when you make a call using this service.

We’re working on making this available in other countries as well. If you’re not in India and want to use this service, let us know where you’re located and we’ll see what we can do. Read more about this service on the SMS Callback page.