Woice.me – async voice communication for teams: work, at your own pace

"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

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.

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

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!

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.