Verbz: Voice-based messaging
verbz.ai
verbz.ai
Can someone please explain this to me in plain text what it is and who it’s for? Because in an office (it seems like a B2B tool), voice either reveals things you don’t want heard or annoys those around you (never mind the other issues with speech recognition and voice based interfaces).
We're experimenting with dictation that keeps the audio, allows you to format it in a way that can be read (or used by other systems... like project management tools or CRM). You built up notes ad tasks with lots of little grabs. Like writing, you talk in bursts.
Keeping the audio means you don't have to worry as much about transcription errors or misunderstood tone. You can be very fast and casual - unlike written - and the audio is a safety net.
Voice recording takes a little getting used to, a lot of execs currently record voice memos for their EA... who then have to type it into something useful.
We hope to make this behaviour accessible to everyone, because it's fast and kind of amazing when it works.
Nope, easiest is to skip this and move along.
The HN frontpage gets you 15 seconds of attention. It's worth taking the time to come up with a 15 second pitch before you go live.
Some key things to get my to commit...
- feeling very “locked in” already ... ability to export notes is important
- search! With results ranked by a mix of most recent, most read ... relevancy also matters but not as much as the recency (a note I just created) or most read (a note I keep going back to) ... the latter implies keeping track of how often I read notes
- sharing outside of the app eg to Signal / WhatsApp
Side note: I’m a big Evernote user for personal use only. Positioning against Evernote’s ecosystem will be tough if you want to make a walled garden
Data export is what we've been working on right now. What would be the first integration point you'd like to see? We've been discussing internally where to put our focus right now.
Fully agree with what you mentioned on search.
Focus on a great experience that I can’t replicate elsewhere, and I won’t have a need to leave (anytime soon).
I sense from your other comments that you're in trolling mode, but if you're serious on this point, remember that user data freedom is a cultural signal that the team is committed to the best user experience. We proved this at Red Hat and it's the basic battle plan for SaaS these days. Any team that show me I'm not locked in is already building trust. Strange to see people arguing the opposite.
If you're talking about Red Hat, you're talking about products developed by a large company that are expected to be supported and well built before they go out there door. The tendency of Red Hat's products gear towards enterprise needs that are well understood and often times the bulk of the exercise is more about engineering than finding product market fit.
None of that is the case here. This is an early stage company that just released their first product on a single platform, made by a handful of people on a hope and a dream. I've been there. I've also seen my fair share of distractions. I don't doubt that for you it's part of your basic needs. But that doesn't mean it's part of the basic needs of the majority of their future customers. It's very easy to get side tracked on early feedback for feature requests that even when made don't convert to actual usage.
Looking over the homepage, I don't believe they have found product market fit. To me, their messaging is unclear, and who this is for is not obvious. Even if they're on the right track, why should they waste time (and this opportunity on HN) for anything but getting the core product experience out to people? Leaving their platform is anything but a core product experience... it's an off ramp. When you have no cars on your freeway, on-ramps are far more important.
Think the first thing would be just some way to share read-only via a URL with people that don't have the app - unique ID but otherwise public - that's then easy to share with messaging apps - WhatsApp most of all I guess
- Fully remote startup. I'm cofounder and CPO and running between meetings. Drowning under Slack, Asana, and Voxer.
I realised in our team context, voice was a really great way to put context into async collaboration, but really annoying to have to sit and listen to the whole message in realtime. Conversely voice-to-text alone misses the context of being able to listen when I want to. I wanted both at once.
I also realised that voice is super easy to send while in transit. And text is super easy to read. Best of both worlds. And then with Verbz automatically assigning tasks just by listening to my message, that was a breakthrough moment. Likewise just taking notes for myself it's great, as I hate typing on my phone when I've got lots to express, and I hate how iOS voice memos name and store. Plus I rarely actually go back and properly manage them.
Verbz is a no-brainer. The challenge is implementing in our team in a way where it doesn't get in the way of our JIRA-as-atomic-units-of-work workflow for the wider team. Our core management team however seems to fit this model nicely.
It's easily a product that the other apps will copycat as it gets traction. But it's not jammed full of ads or leaking my data so I'm happy for now. The team is really responsive, which is the bitter sweet part of early stage products - getting to feel like your suggestions are heard, but knowing that as they grow that's no always going to be the case as they get big. In the meantime, it's an instant RIP to Voxer for us.
> If you’re tapping keys, you’re wasting time. With Verbz, you’ll collaborate at an incredible 170 words per minute. That’s 8x faster than texting!
Just a thought, according to most typing tests I’m at 150WPM. If Verbz has no errors it’s better - if it does have errors I may not be the target niche.
That said, bravo as this will help most people who aren’t adept at typing improve their productivity.
We played around with passive detection, but it's still too flakey and ASR breaks down entirely if you start pronouncing names with a different languages pronunciation.
English - Hugo - fine! English - Portuguese pronunciation - Ugo - 100% fail. Portuguese - Ugo - fine!
Awesome feedback!
The team is gonna get on that. No good excuse for heavy graphics, that's not how we roll.
This may be normal in other industries, but it’s tilted towards the boss’s convenience, rather than the IC’s. (It’s not very Leader / Leader vs Leader / Follower for example)
One of those marketing features- like buying a plane ticket with Siri.. Cool idea, never happened :)
We plan to get a lot smarter with enrichment in future - like referring to docs or projects to bring them into the conversation.
"We're not trying to replace Slack for huge operations teams, we want highly mobile or highly personal teams to communicate and manage their work better."
It limits our flexibility a bit, but it means our customer's data isn't being farmed off to a tagging factory somewhere.
No small startup can afford to do more than 1 or 2 languages, infrastructure cost overhead is incredible and the platforms keep moving faster and faster.
We think of these engines as cloud services, we're productizing infrastructure.
We want to be your interface to create and validate, so we're going to help get your data out and where ever it needs to go.
One day soon we'd like for you to be able to build your own workflows, validation and enrichment rules. That's a little while off, but that's where we're heading.
So the benefit for us has been using Verbz to do voice, with automagical transcription as well as source audio. The task allocated and personal notation is icing on the cake.
We're still working out what else we want or need, or how best to use this, but that really core (maybe really niche) use case for us has been amazing. It... just works. This will be a default product and feature set within six months. Easy.
I don't mean to pick on Verbz. I'm just upset that after 30ish years of consumer apps everything is still so fragmented. Launching an app that reaches most users shouldn't be such a difficult task.
If you can hit your stride with iOS then it should be easy to go to android provided enough resources. However, your core offering to me doesn’t make much sense. Duplicating that on android doesn’t seem like a good value add.
Looking at their app I don't see it as a generic thing at all. They're aiming for consumer-oriented UX... unless you're doing something 100% custom and wild, then you will look out of place on your respective platform using generic toolkits.... or you'll typically have to re-invent the wheel for each platform in some non-native toolkit.
They're also on iOS first. IMHO, UIKit (and soon SwiftUI) is the best mobile development toolkit out there, including generic solutions.
FWIW the Facebook example is not necessarily generalisable. The original Facebook app was a thin wrapper around the existing mobile web site. It was a leaky and poorly designed abstraction that was fundamentally flawed.
So far the only actual success I’ve seen is electron on the desktop, and in that world everyone complains how apps use huge amounts of RAM.
There’s only one true success for a generic solution across all platforms: the web. Because it doesn’t pretend to integrate natively, nor depend on native APIs. But with it will always come limitations that cannot be avoided.
Or are you only selling to teams for internal communication?
I think the recent advances with voice tech really gives us all a great opportunity to rethink how we design input and interactions for the systems we use day to day.
For example, I remember when a mouse was an optional peripheral on PCs but now I just can't imagine not relying on some sort of trackpad or mouse. I really think we're at that point with voice changing how interact with systems, and Verbz is our first steps at realising that.
I'm one of the makers, happy to answer questions!
We were using Signal and Voxer together, as our specific use case requires nuance that voice is great for. We tried Loom but like Voxer, it just adds this linear playback experience that's so painful at scale.
Being able to speak in realtime, but review at a glance, is amazing. Verbz is indispensable to teams like ours in a kind of "it's so obvious you want voice and text at once" kind of way. The task allocation thing is already "hey that's cool" but seeing their roadmap, gets me excited. Of course, everyone and their dog will copy Verbz now, it's pathetic that Messenger and WhatsApp don't do this by default, so it's the "cool other stuff" they're adding that I'm curious to see. But even as a beta user I don't get shown everything so YMMV.