What so many people love about podcasts, is their personal and intimate nature. In my case for example, having listened to maybe 30 or more episodes of the Indie Hacker podcast, Lex Fridman podcast or the All-in podcast, I feel surprisingly close to all those hosts.

In some way, I feel like they've become sort of friends. While they know nothing about me, I've listened to them for hours, recognize their voice and know quite a bit about their lives.

This is why people do podcasts, and why people listen to podcasts. It is a unique format.

For podcasters, there is a strong desire to get the same closeness with their audience or to include them in their episodes directly. This means, finding a good app that can be used to receive voice messages from one's own podcast audience.

In this app, we will review the best apps for that purpose and compare them.

Vocal - embed a voice contact form on your website

Vocal is the leading voice messaging app via email with over 20'000 users. Besides allowing hundreds of people to send audio messages from their Gmail or Outlook account every week, they also make it possible to embed a special "audio" contact form on your website.

Like any other website contact form, they provide a simple HTML code snippet that you can embed on your site.

Here is how it looks on their own website:

The contact form can be fully customised. Text, on the free plan; colors, font and more on the paid plan so you can really make what you want out of it. It also includes a fallback text input. So if someone is unable or unwilling to record their voice, they can send a simple text message instead.

A few notable things:

✅ Contact form is available on the free plan

✅ Everything can be customised (text, font, colors, ..)

✅ Contact form does not contain any Vocal branding (even on the free plan)

✅ No limit to recording length

SpeakPipe - Embeddable or shareable link voicemail page

SpeakPipe is an old app that has been around for a while and does not seem to be actively maintained anymore, yet it still works without issues.

SpeakPipe allows you to either create a web page that you can directly share with anyone or to embed an HTML snippet into your site. Here is how the generated web page looks:

Unfortunately, you cannot customise the text or colors, and there is some branding that does not look very good on the free plan. Recordings are also limited to 90 seconds on the free plan and to 5 and 10 minutes respectively on the basic and pro plan.

The paid plan offers more customisation options but not everything can be customised, even on the most expensive plan.

PodInbox - A fanpage for your podcast

PodInbox looks modern in its design and tries to be a fanpage for your audience where they can contact you, send donations and chat with other fans. While it might be more than you need or not exactly what you're looking for, it is an option to collect recordings from your audience.

You will get a complete web page that looks like this:

You can customise many texts as well as the cover image, but many things like the recorder can't be customised and the podinbox branding has to stay unless you upgrade.

Recordings can be of any length, which is a great thing and the recorder, while not being customisable, is easy to use.

Telbee - An unmaintained voicemail app

Telbee was the Product of the day back in 2020, when it was called Vox. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be actively developed anymore or maintained (for example, the Google login button is not working anymore and the Chrome extension hasn't been updated for two years).

Similar to previously mentioned apps, Telbee generates a page for you that you can share or embed on your site. And once more, on the free plan, you cannot customise anything and are strongly limited. Here is how the default page looks:

But on the paid plan, you can update much more aspects of the app which is good. Though it is worth nothing that the paid plans start at $18/month on the cheapest which is the most expensive of this article, while also the app with the least features.

Thank you for reading this! We hope you'll find the best tool to make your podcast and website more human and approachable. At the end of the day, it is all about human connection.

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