I understand that it's often easier to express something with a quick voice message, rather than writing it up. But is it searchable? Is it coherent information that I can refer to, copy and paste? Is it efficiently consumable?
No. More often than not it is a meandering, unreflected ramble with low information density.
You also can't fix mistakes or reword something in a voice messages without re recording the whole thing, so you just leave it as is. Or record an addendum.
Voice messages are more convenient for the producer, but are always more work for the consumer.
Automatic transcripts help a bit, sure. But they only go so far. Both because of accuracy and because of different structure to the content.
I can see niches where this is useful, but I very much do not want to be bombarded with voice messages in a professional context.
> Voice messages are easier for the producer, but are always more work for the consumer.
This is so true especially for long voice messages. I really don't like listening to people thinking aloud about what they want to tell me. I mean...this isn't a suprised-by-voicemail moment, they intentionally decided they wanted to send this voice message in the first place.
But it gets even worse if you (like me) don't like sending voice messages. Maybe it's just me, but to reply to a lengthy voice message via text I have to listen to it in parts multiple times to adress every question/topic which was raised in it.
I'm totally fine with people calling me, if they prefer voice. But please don't send me voice messages as long you're not in a car or otherwise unable to text and have a real important message.
> I very much do not want to be bombarded with voice messages in a professional context.
I had one client who started sending me voice messages and it drove me nuts. I realised that most people tend to forget what they said in a voice message faster then via other means.
Actually EVERYTHING that is easier for the producer is harder for the consumer, and basically given that an average produced item would have a nontrivial number of consumers, every corner you cut has a massive cost for everyone else.
There should be a technology that can automate all the kinds of things a producer can do to make it easier for consumers to search, discover, remix and collaborate with git and so on.
There's also some practical concerns. You can't check voice messages while you're in a call. You can't check them in an office setting without having to look for a headset. You can't see them on a smartwatch etc. And it takes a lot more time to consume the content. I can read in 5 seconds what it takes 60 seconds to speak :)
No we didn't. We use MS Teams pretty much exclusively (it's one of the things I look after). We experimented with MS Teams' Walkie Talkie feature but it requires specific Samsung devices with a Push To Talk button so it was prohibitively expensive. But we always planned for this only in a frontline worker usecase (security, first aid, maintenance etc)
We built a similar app for asynch 1-1 & group voice chat (back in 2010 or so, it was called Voicee).
Found exactly the same thing (even when we/founders were developing it and knew how to use it). It's so much easier to keep blabbing and that will put the burden on the listener(s) to spend time & focus on playing it.
We didn't have audio transcription, so this may change the game a bit. So, if the sender can't (or doesn't want to) type at the moment, could reply to an otherwise text stream via voice. When we started, iMessage, WhatsApp didn't have asynch voice capability, but now they do - I guess having transcription always enabled would be a differentiator.
But in general (a request that I ignored for too long), you'll have to have texting capability in your app too, otherwise people will gravitate towards whatever allows them to read & type without distracting others with playing audio...
Understood on voice messages substituting written communication - but what about when they substitute synchronous meetings and calls? Sometimes async voice can be better where you can communicate a couple pages of thoughts in a few minute, with tone of voice.
Thanks for the comment fblp, I agree with you here: this depends on the situation - sometimes async voice memo can work better than having called another meeting.
> you can communicate a couple pages of thoughts in a few minute
The canonical answer to this is for the sender to spend a couple of minutes to distill down those thoughts into less text. This is solved by improved writing.
I agree for with your reasons, but if they add a transcript feature, and allow 2x playback speed, this could be handy. You could choose to read vs listen / watch. There is a advantage to voice / video which is that you can detect tone and nuance much more readily. You can also listen to your messages while running or driving.
When you’re driving please focus on driving or you’ll end up killing someone.
If you’re paying attention to driving you’re not paying (full) attention to messages; you’ll have to listen to them again once you stop. So just use email :)
I agree loloquwowndueo: safety first - don't text and drive or do anything distracting while driving, including listening to work-related voice messages.
Hi the_duke, thanks for your feedback, all your concerns are on point.
If not a secret, did you/your team use any type of voice messaging maybe? I'm trying to find different use cases so we could anticipate any possible issues/bottlenecks down the road.
You're acting like email has to go away if this gets used. Simply use both. There certainly are use cases for this and hearing someones voice can convey things that words can't.
Seems great. The pricing distrubs me. 75$/month this really nothing for big organization with 1000+ employee.
Also, all your testimonials seems fake. People are unfindable and no company is cited. Why do you do this ? This creates trust issues from the beginning
Personally I hate it when people dump voice messages on me on whatsapp/telegram, and I tend to ignore them. An app that stimulates this behaviour even more... Just nope.
And transcription doesn't work well enough so you still have to listen to the messages.
Interesting product. But I can see why other HNers are not so kind to it. It's probably because they are not the target market you should be going after. Nobody is going to switch from Slack to Woice simply because they can now send an audio message - I am sure there apps on Slack that can do this.
Instead of going after the enterprise collab segment which is already highly competitive and does well with text, I think this product needs to go after industries where audio is a necessity.
Say media production companies where video makers collaborate with voice artists. Or, english teaching groups where students submit their homework in audio.
These are all large niches to go after and I am not really sure if there are collaboration tools targeted entirely at them.
this reminds me of the phones that had the 'chirp' / push-to-talk feature that were popular in the early 2000's - which were hugely popular with people in various trades, service industries, etc - think telecom repair crews, construction crews, live event staff, etc - jobs where permanence of the information is not so important but realtime/async/hands-free was. could be a good fit.
Seems interesting
Not to be negative, would be annoying to tell anyone about this app, all the extra effort to make sure they understand the name is woice.me and not voice.me
Thanks for your comments/ideas/voiced concerns: I didn't expect this much engagement, maybe a comment or two. I'm thankful for the time and energy put into your replies - I'll try to address each one as detailed as possible & edit this comment with general updates.
Is the hypothesis that, even though we've had ubiquitous async voice service communication ("voicemail") for decades, that it'd be better if we had yet another way to do it? I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing.
I have so many meetings „that could have been an email“ but the thing is text has in my opinion a higher barrier to quickly and fluidly describe loose concepts and ideas. Every time I write an email or a message, I feel like something gets taken away.
But I think you have to be careful how to use this tool. If you just go ahead and start rambling, I think there is going to be a lot more noise than before and that’s what people usually do with voice messages.
Upvoted for trying something that I think most people would dismiss as a solution to a problem no one has. The best ideas are the ones most people think are bad.
I had a similar idea almost a decade ago — straight to voice-mail messaging. I never tried implementing it because everyone started using text messaging, which is faster and more efficient than any other medium except (maybe) face-to-face conversation.
I say “maybe” because a face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) conversation is actually inefficient in terms of signal to noise. Conversations meander unless everyone involved has strong communication skills, or there is an excellent facilitator. But where voice-communication shines is in its very tight feedback-loop — tighter than any other method. No waiting for an email response. No waiting for the slack or IM “so and so is writing” to turn into a message. No interpreting the tea-leaves of text to figure out intent, emotion, and tone. Voice-to-voice is slow in terms of raw information transmission, but it is the fastest method of identifying the signal in the noise and then focusing everyone’s attention upon that signal.
This is to say that voice-communication’s greatest value is in being a synchronous feedback loop.
Now, if you can figure out how to keep that feedback-loop while moving to async, then I think you’ve got a killer product.
There’s actually a hack that people currently resort to when async voice-communication is a requirement: middle management. Middle managers talk to upper management enough to be able to then speak as if they are upper management to the individual contributors. Although C-Suite execs can send an email to the whole company, it generally works better to talk with the managers enough so that the managers can then speak to their teams. An email can be misunderstood. It can’t answer questions. It can’t elaborate on varying tropics of interest to varying teams and individuals. Good managers almost always have excellent communication skills, in that they serve as a medium of asynchronous voice-communication.
So transcription isn’t really what is needed. What’s needed is the ability to get a brain dump from someone (voice is best for this), parse and integrate that dump into some kind of knowledge-base, and then enable interactive human-level voice-communication with that knowledge-base. If you could pull that off, then you’ve essentially made a super-middle-manager that talks to every single person in the company all the time, never forgets anything, and is capable of getting the right information to the right person at the right time.
So basically, a Siri for a company that listens as much as it talks, and actually works.
Just my two cents, but congrats on tackling a quite interesting problem, and best of luck!
True. But for me, a product is variable while a vision is constant. If the vision here is improving async communication through the use of voice, and if the current iteration of the product doesn’t fulfill that vision (which is determined by traction, not conjecture like mine), then hopefully what everyone has written in this thread will provide some helpful insight to the founders. That was my intention at least! :)
Tencent for one. Also, why would you move if the app is not much different? A migration is costly and Discord doesn't offer anything substantial over Slack.
I see most companies now gravitating towards MS Teams instead. As it comes for free with O365 and performs adequately. I still prefer Slack with its joinable channels and higher screen density but I have to make do with teams as the company I work for is also one of those who have dropped Slack for Teams.
one could just as simply make the inverse statement without qualifying it: "Why don't more gamers simply use slack? Discord is slack for zoomers" - although having used both, the feature set is not identical, so ignoring the obvious generation predjudice, both statements are equally invalid.
We recently tried to use Discord to set up community servers for our users. Turns out that Discord has an extremely sensitive bot detection filter which made it hard for a lot of users to get into the server in the first place. Of course, we can’t turn it off and Discord wasn’t interested in helping us, so we had to scrap the integration and find another solution.
TLDR: Wouldn’t recommend Discord for a professional use case
It doesn't matter what anybody says, if some users love you and it is sustainable then keep building and make it a big success. Don't listen to the weirdo-naysayers here.
"If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then."
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
In the future, if anyone notices a case of this and has a minute to email hn@ycombinator.com, it helps a lot to let us know!
"Join the waitlist now and get FREE 3 months of early access when we launch!"
I understand that it's often easier to express something with a quick voice message, rather than writing it up. But is it searchable? Is it coherent information that I can refer to, copy and paste? Is it efficiently consumable?
No. More often than not it is a meandering, unreflected ramble with low information density.
You also can't fix mistakes or reword something in a voice messages without re recording the whole thing, so you just leave it as is. Or record an addendum.
Voice messages are more convenient for the producer, but are always more work for the consumer.
Automatic transcripts help a bit, sure. But they only go so far. Both because of accuracy and because of different structure to the content.
I can see niches where this is useful, but I very much do not want to be bombarded with voice messages in a professional context.
This is so true especially for long voice messages. I really don't like listening to people thinking aloud about what they want to tell me. I mean...this isn't a suprised-by-voicemail moment, they intentionally decided they wanted to send this voice message in the first place.
But it gets even worse if you (like me) don't like sending voice messages. Maybe it's just me, but to reply to a lengthy voice message via text I have to listen to it in parts multiple times to adress every question/topic which was raised in it.
I'm totally fine with people calling me, if they prefer voice. But please don't send me voice messages as long you're not in a car or otherwise unable to text and have a real important message.
> I very much do not want to be bombarded with voice messages in a professional context.
I had one client who started sending me voice messages and it drove me nuts. I realised that most people tend to forget what they said in a voice message faster then via other means.
There should be a technology that can automate all the kinds of things a producer can do to make it easier for consumers to search, discover, remix and collaborate with git and so on.
Maybe start a company to do that?
Honestly, I think that voice messages are not the end-all solution for work communication - I'm treating this more as an addition to text messages.
Did you by any chance tried voice messages in your work setting? How did that work out, any specific problems you've encountered?
Found exactly the same thing (even when we/founders were developing it and knew how to use it). It's so much easier to keep blabbing and that will put the burden on the listener(s) to spend time & focus on playing it.
We didn't have audio transcription, so this may change the game a bit. So, if the sender can't (or doesn't want to) type at the moment, could reply to an otherwise text stream via voice. When we started, iMessage, WhatsApp didn't have asynch voice capability, but now they do - I guess having transcription always enabled would be a differentiator.
But in general (a request that I ignored for too long), you'll have to have texting capability in your app too, otherwise people will gravitate towards whatever allows them to read & type without distracting others with playing audio...
The canonical answer to this is for the sender to spend a couple of minutes to distill down those thoughts into less text. This is solved by improved writing.
If you’re paying attention to driving you’re not paying (full) attention to messages; you’ll have to listen to them again once you stop. So just use email :)
If not a secret, did you/your team use any type of voice messaging maybe? I'm trying to find different use cases so we could anticipate any possible issues/bottlenecks down the road.
Thanks in advance!
Also, all your testimonials seems fake. People are unfindable and no company is cited. Why do you do this ? This creates trust issues from the beginning
1) Christopher Hettinger -> A fake person who is selling medicine https://finvsfin.com/rogaine-vs-minoxidil/
2) Ben Schwartzman -> A fake testimonial on an education site https://coursecentral.co.uk/student-success-stories/
3) Isabelle Desjardins -> A random, fake student? https://polban.academia.edu/DianneCastaldo
etc. etc.
If you're going to fake it til you make it, at least choose images that aren't so easily verifiable!
The benefit of the written word is that it can be scanned, searched, cut, copied etc.
And transcription doesn't work well enough so you still have to listen to the messages.
Instead of going after the enterprise collab segment which is already highly competitive and does well with text, I think this product needs to go after industries where audio is a necessity.
Say media production companies where video makers collaborate with voice artists. Or, english teaching groups where students submit their homework in audio.
These are all large niches to go after and I am not really sure if there are collaboration tools targeted entirely at them.
It's already an absolute nightmare to make sure business data is easily searchable, this would make it a million times worse.
I cannot image a single sane IT manager procuring this for their company.
In addition, if this was added to alternatives as a feature I'd disable it company wide.
If transcripts are auto generated then I can just read them and not bother with the voice bit?
It is sold as "Asynchronous voice messaging for small teams", Farhter down it says:
"No more second-guessing who said what in a meeting: transcripts, without the hassle. "
That confused me in the beginning, but I saw that it is also live voice meetings.
I think that should be spelled out better.
"Async and sync platform, you get what the others have with the added benefit of async"?
Yeah yeah I am not in marketing. Far from it. Thankfully.
I already hate it in my private life, why would I want such a thing at work
The first thing I do in every meeting is ban the transcription bot one of my colleagues set up.
Thanks for your comments/ideas/voiced concerns: I didn't expect this much engagement, maybe a comment or two. I'm thankful for the time and energy put into your replies - I'll try to address each one as detailed as possible & edit this comment with general updates.
"nibmle" should be "nimble".
I have so many meetings „that could have been an email“ but the thing is text has in my opinion a higher barrier to quickly and fluidly describe loose concepts and ideas. Every time I write an email or a message, I feel like something gets taken away.
But I think you have to be careful how to use this tool. If you just go ahead and start rambling, I think there is going to be a lot more noise than before and that’s what people usually do with voice messages.
I had a similar idea almost a decade ago — straight to voice-mail messaging. I never tried implementing it because everyone started using text messaging, which is faster and more efficient than any other medium except (maybe) face-to-face conversation.
I say “maybe” because a face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) conversation is actually inefficient in terms of signal to noise. Conversations meander unless everyone involved has strong communication skills, or there is an excellent facilitator. But where voice-communication shines is in its very tight feedback-loop — tighter than any other method. No waiting for an email response. No waiting for the slack or IM “so and so is writing” to turn into a message. No interpreting the tea-leaves of text to figure out intent, emotion, and tone. Voice-to-voice is slow in terms of raw information transmission, but it is the fastest method of identifying the signal in the noise and then focusing everyone’s attention upon that signal.
This is to say that voice-communication’s greatest value is in being a synchronous feedback loop.
Now, if you can figure out how to keep that feedback-loop while moving to async, then I think you’ve got a killer product.
There’s actually a hack that people currently resort to when async voice-communication is a requirement: middle management. Middle managers talk to upper management enough to be able to then speak as if they are upper management to the individual contributors. Although C-Suite execs can send an email to the whole company, it generally works better to talk with the managers enough so that the managers can then speak to their teams. An email can be misunderstood. It can’t answer questions. It can’t elaborate on varying tropics of interest to varying teams and individuals. Good managers almost always have excellent communication skills, in that they serve as a medium of asynchronous voice-communication.
So transcription isn’t really what is needed. What’s needed is the ability to get a brain dump from someone (voice is best for this), parse and integrate that dump into some kind of knowledge-base, and then enable interactive human-level voice-communication with that knowledge-base. If you could pull that off, then you’ve essentially made a super-middle-manager that talks to every single person in the company all the time, never forgets anything, and is capable of getting the right information to the right person at the right time.
So basically, a Siri for a company that listens as much as it talks, and actually works.
Just my two cents, but congrats on tackling a quite interesting problem, and best of luck!
But it is not at all what this product is.
I have however been unfortunate enough to deal with so many voice assistants to realise it's a pipe dream. For now, at least.
I see most companies now gravitating towards MS Teams instead. As it comes for free with O365 and performs adequately. I still prefer Slack with its joinable channels and higher screen density but I have to make do with teams as the company I work for is also one of those who have dropped Slack for Teams.
TLDR: Wouldn’t recommend Discord for a professional use case
It doesn't matter what anybody says, if some users love you and it is sustainable then keep building and make it a big success. Don't listen to the weirdo-naysayers here.