Air chat is a recent social media app that encourages users to “just talk.”
The previous version of Airchat was released last 12 months, however the team — led by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder chief product officer Brian Norgard — rebuilt the app and relaunched it on iOS and Android yesterday. Currently available only by invitation, Airchat already ranks twenty seventh within the rating of social networks within the Apple App Store.
Visually, Airchat should feel quite familiar and intuitive, with the power to follow other users, scroll through a feed of posts, after which reply, like, and share those posts. The difference is that posts and replies are audio recordings that the app then transcribes.
When you open Airchat, messages robotically start playing and you’ll be able to quickly switch between messages by swiping up and down. If you’re feeling prefer it, you’ll be able to pause the sound and just read the text; users may share photos and videos. However, everyone appears to be specializing in audio, and Ravikant describes this as changing the dynamic in comparison with text-based social media apps.
After joining Airchat this morning, many of the posts I saw were in regards to the app itself, with Ravikant and Norgard answering questions and asking for feedback.
“All humans are designed to get along with other humans, all you need is a natural voice,” Ravikant said. “Text-only online media has given us the illusion that people can’t get along, when in reality anyone can get along.”
This is not the primary time tech startups have bet on voice as the following big thing in social media. But Airchat’s asynchronous, threaded posts provide a very different experience than the live chat rooms that briefly flourished on Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Norgard argued that this approach removes the stage fright that makes participation difficult because “you can take any number of takes on writing a message here and no one knows about it.”
He even said that when talking to early users, the team found that “most people using AirChat today are very introverted and shy.”
Personally, I have not convinced myself of anything yet. I used to be more excited about how others were using the app – plus I even have a love-hate relationship with the sound of my voice.
Still, there’s something to be said for listening to Ravikant and Norgard explain their vision, fairly than simply reading the transcripts, which can lack the nuances of enthusiasm, intonation, etc. I’m especially interested by how deadpan jokes and shitty posts translate (or not) to sound.
I even have a little bit of a problem with speed. By default, the app plays 2x audio, which I feel sounds unnatural, especially if the entire idea is to advertise human connection. You can reset the speed by holding down the pause button, but at 1x I noticed that I start skimming longer posts after which often skip ahead before listening to the total audio. But perhaps that is okay.
Meanwhile, Ravikant’s belief in the ability of the voice to scale back acrimony does not necessarily eliminate the necessity for content moderation. He said the channel operates under “some complicated rules about hiding spam, trolls and people you or they may not want to hear about,” but on the time of publication he had not responded to a follow-up user query about content moderation.
When asked about monetization – i.e. when we will start watching ads, audio or other content – Ravikant replied that “there is no monetization pressure on the company.” (He described himself as “not the only investor” but a “large investor” in the corporate.)
“I could care less about monetization,” he said. “If necessary, we will conduct this matter at a modest level.”
Credit : techcrunch.com
