Does anyone ever use the walkie-walkie function on iWatch? | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone ever use the walkie-walkie function on iWatch?

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23 pointsjanandonly43 comments

I think it has a great foundation. With some improvements, it could be even better. Something in between being on and off. Right now it’s either getting the voice memos immediately or not being able to receive anything at all.

Maybe the new focus modes can work with the walkie talkie as well.

I’m sure there’s another one or two features that’s aren’t huge accommodations to make it better.

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Personally, I’ve used it for accountability before. When a friend and I were unemployed, we would have to have our walkie talkie on and have to respond in a reasonable time as one light way to keep each other more aware and accountable.

It's really nice when snowboarding with friends, instead of taking the phone from the backpack every time you miss your crew.

There are also other features of the iWatch that make it really nice when snowboarding, like emergency calls and activity tracking, but that's off topic.

on the topic of snowboarding

https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/souuve/dad_mic...

Now there's a welcome break from The Sky is Falling political news. Cheers!

I recently set up my Apple Watch and discovered the Walkie-talkie function.

Basically, it allows me to send voice memo's to another person, where the Apple Watch on the receiving end will play the voice memo when the Walkie-talkie function is on.

But here is the thing: I don't want to be disturbed 24/7 by a voice coming from my wrist. When I am available for others, my iMessage or Signal app will inform me of any incoming messages just as well. And when I am not available, I don't want the extra hassle of switching my Walkie-talkie app off as well as setting my phone to "do not disturb"

For certain moments and limited groups the inmediate playing could be very useful, like a group of people skying or in a job site where you need inmediate communication at a distance when installing something, not office work, more contractor like situation: “please bring the box from the trunk” or something like that. Last vacations I was looking for something like this while skiing in Andorra with friends, as each call is in roaming and extremely expensive (like 8-10€ per call) But what I needed was a network independent app, and I couldn’t find one. So I guess this app fails short for Me anyway as it uses Facetime.

> like a group of people skying or in a job site where you need inmediate communication at a distance when installing something, not office work, more contractor like situation: “please bring the box from the trunk” or something like that.

Wouldn't you rather use some actual radios for this? They make small PMR ones that aren't expensive, need no license/permit (in Germany at least) and have surprisingly good reach. We used a pair of these to communicate with people in a heavily reinforced concrete basement that blocked out cellular and data completely, and on hiking trips in the alps (though with a lot of rock in between you need at least something to reflect your signal, but that's still way better than yelling)

> But what I needed was a network independent app

Not sure if that's actually possible with decent reach. After all, I don't think you get direct control over iPhone/Apple Watch modems/transmitters and neither wifi nor bluetooth are optimized for this use case.

> bluetooth are optimized for this use case.

Bluetooth 5 has up to 1km performance at few hundred kbps. With good codecs thats near real time. Of course Apple doesn't support it.

The "up to" tends to dissipate very quickly in an urban setting without line of sight and with much interference on the same band...

In urban settings you normally have 4G

Yes, modern PMR can be very good amd afordable, and I own 4 of them!. But for this trip I couldn’t take them with me and was looking for a mobile phone solution. I guess you are right and they simply don’t have the power..

Yes I’m hoping there will be ways to allow walkIe talkie to be blocked during certain focus modes. It sucks there’s no way to send the equivalent of “to be listened to later” voice memos. So if the person has it off there’s nothing you can do.

I wanted to try it but I couldn't even get it to work between my and my wife's watch (or my friend's for that matter). It simply doesn't work.

But yeah, I wouldn't see me using this function for the reason you mentioned. It's "too wild". Perhaps now with the user profiles it would be possible to not allow messages when you're in certain modes (like "work" or "do not disturb"). Can you do that or does it have to be always on?

It's called Apple Watch and not iWatch.

Hrm. Maybe we should close down this thread and discussion with the title being incorrect

Why it's not on iPhones tho? Voice Messages on iPhone is so horrible to use.

Also kinda weird thing - you ask Siri to call someone and phone is not on speakerphone. How Apple keeps missing such basic use cases?

If you have your HomeKit provisioned, you can use the intercom feature to reach everyone in your home. Home meaning, users you have provisioned in your home. It is a good way to announce "dinner in 30 minutes" or "pick up bread".

I kind of like that its not on the iPhone. That means I know when I try to WT my wife that its going to her watch

You can ask Siri to call someone using the speaker, just say "Hey Siri, call Bob on speaker".

You can ask Siri to remind you about something and then never see it again or you can ask "Add Calender event tomorrow 10am to take rubbish out with alert 5 minutes before"...

Imagine having to give a voice interface exact commands instead of it just reading your mind and knowing your intent. Maybe in another decade or so. Apple iMplant Pro Mini.

I'm the only person with an Apple watch who I want to talk to, so no.

I've tried it when we first got the watches last year. It worked with various success, but sometimes it would start a facetime call on the receivers phone so we stopped using it.

I tried out the walkie-talkie feature once. It was with one of my wife’s friends.

Holly was the only other person in our entire circle who was geeky enough to want to try it out, and she likewise had not found anyone in her circle of friends to try it out with.

We tried it. It was okay. I don’t think either of us ever tried it again. I know I haven’t.

Therese just no draw there if you don’t have a large enough group of friends who are using it.

That said, I do use my Apple Watch to answer FaceTime calls from my wife, multiple times a day. It’s much less hassle than pulling out the iPhone. Sometimes she gets a bit annoyed at this, because she had something she specifically wanted to show me on video, so I have to call her back with video.

And sometimes I use my Apple Watch to answer telephone calls, too. But I look at the number first. Some are worth taking a bit more time to get out the phone.

But that’s about as far as I go with using audio features on my watch.

Apple once again killing a cool idea by not making it open.

I wanted a one-touch function to ask my wife quick questions across the house. Instead what I got was an unstable and lesser FaceTime audio call that requires both sides to accept the connection every time. So now I just use Siri to call her on FaceTime instead.

Does the 'always allow' option not help with that?

We can't even get the invites to work again between us after we tried deleting and re-adding. I've given up.

Boo :/

Use intercom for this

Yeah and it is quite useful. I used it when I was moving house with my daughter a few months back. Was invaluable for coordinating our efforts at loading and unloading vehicles.

Any communication technology or feature which requires everyone to buy one brand of product in order to participate in is a non-starter. So no.

The whole Dick Tracy thing looks better on paper in a comic.

Actually talking to my wrist just isn't comfortable.

Getting a text message update on a smart watch in't bad.

It’s intended to use headphones with, like airpod pros in transparency mode.

Ah, so. That would be an obvious improvement.

Doesn't the title need a tweak--"walkie-walkie" and "iWatch"?

I'm used to call it iWatch sometimes, I don't know why but it doesn't sound weird to me.

Walkie-walkie on the other hand...

Because iPod, iPhone, iMac and iPad set a precedent.

Everything apple made used to be prefixed with ‘i’, but they’ve since started changing.

What else have they changed? Nothing that’s focused right? the HomePod is there. Not sure if there’s anything else. I don’t consider AirTags or Apple Pencil not being ipencil to be ones since they are small products or ancillary like the Pencil.

I guess even just the iWatch and iPod (lol) vs Apple Watch and HomePod are two huge changes from the historical norm.

Though Mac computers have almost never stuck to the convention. The iBook [and iMac] came out before the dot com bubble and the former was effectively dead by the time I was looking to get an Apple laptop in 2005, 2006. Before iPhone, iPad.

iMac is only computer sticking to the convention.

It seems Apple didn’t stick to this naming convention as much as it is being made out to be.

I use it all the time: it’s a criminally underused feature.

i use it a lot with my wife. comes in handy when one of us is doing something like bathing our child or cooking and can’t walk away.

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