This article was published on June 15, 2009

VooiceBoo brings us crowdsourced audio Twitter Account Verification. What?!


VooiceBoo brings us crowdsourced audio Twitter Account Verification. What?!

VoiceBoo-VerifiedEarlier last week Twitter started rolling out the Verified Accounts program. Earlier today we covered Vooices.us, a company that is on a mission to merge voice and web technologies.

What has started as a showcase for the Vooices platform could potentially become an independent account verification system for Twitter and beyond: Give a warm welcome to the awesome, innovative service, called VooiceBoo!

How does it work?

If you suspect an account to be fake visit the VooiceBoo website.

VooiceBoo authenticates your own Twitter account and asks you to enter the name of the target account. Next VooiceBoo will send a request to verify on your behalf to that Twitter user.

By clicking the link the to-be-verified Twitter user will be asked by VooiceBoo to dial into the service and record a pass-phrase. It’s a simple, 5 seconds process.

Finally the public crowd can start casting their votes whether the recording fits to the Twitter account in question.

Vote for me! :-)

Can’t wait to experience VooiceBoo yourself? Go ahead: Cast your vote for my voice print here and enjoy the results.

VooiceBoo is still in a very early beta

As stated before, VooiceBoo started out as a showcase of what is possible with Vooices.us. Paul and his team is working hard on some important improvements based on the initial feedback they’ve received. Among the things we will see changed are:

  • Enhanced and more intuitive flow
  • Verification Permalinks as in http://www.vooiceboo.com/24z (not working yet)
  • Support for self-assigned verification requests (at this moment, somebody else has to ask you to verify your account)
  • Improved support for viral distribution
  • Later: A REST API to cast votes and pull results

If you give VooiceBoo a try, don’t forget to submit links to your voice prints in the comments!

By the way: We’re OAuth advocated and gladly noticed, that VooiceBoo uses OAuth and does at no point ask for your Twitter credentials. VooiceBoo’s Paul Rawlings told me, that doing the integration was sort of painful. We’re happy they took the extra work.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Also tagged with