Mio is shut down.

I built Mio because I was living abroad, and every call I needed to make, a bank, a consulate, an airline, meant a phone tree in a language I was still learning and an hour of hold music. It seemed obvious that a machine should be the one doing the waiting.

It worked. Mio would dial, sit through the menu, hold the line, and ring me when a real person picked up. The technology was never the problem.

What I got wrong was the wanting. Six months in, it's clear enough that people would rather make the call themselves than hand it to a machine, even the calls they dread, even the hour on hold. I don't think that's irrational. A phone call is one of the few things left where you can tell you're talking to a person who can actually decide something.

That's my read, not a verdict, and plenty of people will land somewhere else on it. If you're one of them, 19pine is the one I'd point you to.