Android and iOS app Roger launched last December as an easy way to share audio clips. The app's simple layout lets you hit a microphone button, record yourself speaking, and then send off a clip to friends or family or anyone who has the (free) app. Roger has since been working on integrating its service with third-party platforms, and today adds support to let users send audio clips to Slack, Dropbox, SoundCloud, Facebook, and Twitter, all through If This Then That.

You can talk to Amazon's Alexa through Roger

The company says this is the next step in its plan to turn Roger into a "voice platform" — a concept that isn't entirely clear, but sounds a little like a hub for bots that you can talk to. Case in point is Amazon's Alexa, which has been available to some of the app's users for a few weeks, but is accessible to everyone from today. Roger isn't the only app to offer access to Alexa with Amazon's hardware ($4.99 app Lexi also does it), but it is the first app we've seen do it for free. You can use Roger / Alexa to complete tasks like ordering an Uber or a pizza, but there are limitations — there are still no controls for music, for example. Some users also complained that Alexa on Roger was slow, although Roger says this is simply because there were limited resources for the beta integration.

Integrating Roger with third-party platforms definitely widens the app's functionality (after all, you can already send voice clips on a number of messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger), but communicating in this way still seems like a bit of a niche pursuit. There are some interesting use cases (sending voice notes to your Dropbox for example), but it's not clear they'll be enough to attract a wider audience.