Akka already had typed actors, but most of the times they are useless.
The problem with actors is that they can change their interface at runtime. Very useful if you want to model state machines for example (see context.become or the FSM helpers) and it's one reason why actors are awesome.
Actors can also get their messages from multiple sources. The messages that you (the user of an actor) can send to an actor can be very different from the messages that an actor receives from other actors that it communicates with.
The problem with actors is that they can change their interface at runtime. Very useful if you want to model state machines for example (see context.become or the FSM helpers) and it's one reason why actors are awesome.
Actors can also get their messages from multiple sources. The messages that you (the user of an actor) can send to an actor can be very different from the messages that an actor receives from other actors that it communicates with.
The example given for Tcp-IO should drive this point across: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.2.0-RC1/scala/io-tcp.html