I don't see why they would need to interface with iMessage at all. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it just seems like they're responding to text messages sent to a particular number.
I think iMessage is a smart choice. it lets their customers communicate via a Mac, iPod, or iPad in addition to an iPhone. Text messages also cost me money, so not having to worry about that is another selling point.
It also makes scaling their side of the system easier. Instead of having some sort of CRM/SMS gateway system, they can just hook however many Macs they want to to their account, and all messages sent to it will get copied to all of them. This makes it easy to hand off a communication session between agents in a way that's transparent to the users of the service.
Of course, the downside is that it's an Apple-only protocol, so they will be prematurely excluding users of non-Apple devices, but maybe that's a tradeoff that the company's willing to make at this time.
Good point. I didn't notice this distinction (I'm not current an iOS user). Although they claim you're communicating with humans, so they could potentially just be using iMessage at their current scale. Or the screenshots could be from a simple fully manual demo.
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I don't see why they would need to interface with iMessage at all. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it just seems like they're responding to text messages sent to a particular number.
I think iMessage is a smart choice. it lets their customers communicate via a Mac, iPod, or iPad in addition to an iPhone. Text messages also cost me money, so not having to worry about that is another selling point.
It also makes scaling their side of the system easier. Instead of having some sort of CRM/SMS gateway system, they can just hook however many Macs they want to to their account, and all messages sent to it will get copied to all of them. This makes it easy to hand off a communication session between agents in a way that's transparent to the users of the service.
Of course, the downside is that it's an Apple-only protocol, so they will be prematurely excluding users of non-Apple devices, but maybe that's a tradeoff that the company's willing to make at this time.
the screenshot they put on the homepage suggests that it does interface with iMessage?
AppleScript can interface with iMessage, so it's certainly possible to magic up an interface.
The screenshots I see just show a regular text message conversation.
Blue bubbles are for iMessage, green is for SMS.
It also says "iMessage" at the top of the conversation.
Good point. I didn't notice this distinction (I'm not current an iOS user). Although they claim you're communicating with humans, so they could potentially just be using iMessage at their current scale. Or the screenshots could be from a simple fully manual demo.