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Show HN: My new platform. Check it out

sonarmobileapp.com

36 pointsEthanLannan16 comments

This platform is an experimental social network solely based on soundclips. SONAR is meant to encourage genuine conversation and entertainment. I believe audio culture in the form of this app could create a community that is safe, smart, and more human than many of the current social media platforms.

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One thing that visual media (text, image, silent video) offers but audio typically struggles with is the ability to skim; to spend way less time than the content really deserves, in an effort to figure out if you should take a deep dive and engage. Do you have any plans to cater to people in a rush, whatever their reason might be? For example, news radio broadcasts (think AM radio with 10 minute cycles) often use automatic processing that doesn't just speed up the recording, but actually cuts out silence, so the individual words themselves aren't faster, but the clip as a whole is faster. Maybe automatic transcripts, too?

One of the millions of features I had penciled in for my podcasting app - that didn't survive a rewrite in typescript - was the ability to detect different speakers and skip to the next one. Probably even topic based could work too if you can convert the audio to words at specific instances, subject detection may or may not work well I guess. Worth a try.

I actually know someone developing technology for this use case. She's hearing impaired and is trying to build an application that transcribes voice to text from a variety of people in a single conversation. Very helpful for her in social situations where she can't lipread multiple people at once, especially if they're wearing masks obviously.

https://imanyco.com/

Cool stuff. The pioneering efforts of a11y tools can inform UI patterns in ways that go well beyond accommodating the specific needs they were invented for. Having witnessed a blind person using VoiceOver on her iPhone with a very high speed (like, the 2x or 4x setting on many video players doesn't even come close to the speed I'm talking about!) actually contributed to the idea I presented in my earlier comment: consuming audio in a "speed reading" fashion. Nobody's got the patience to drink from the social media firehose at conversational speed.

I agree.

I built https://taaalk.co which looks a bit like Sonar but for text based long-form conversations - so skimming is possible.

The current site is content-less as I had to change servers.

Previous content can be seen on archive.org (https://web.archive.org/web/20210316214650/https://taaalk.co...)

I'm going to be reuploading the content and getting the community started again, so if you want to sign up to it please do and I will email you when it gets going. (A good place to sign up is on the Start a Conversation page, where you can leave your details for other Taaalkers to start talking with you).

I believe PocketCasts (the podcast app) has that feature and I really love it (except when listening to audio dramas or music :P - thankfully can be configured per podcast).

It really makes a lot of difference especially with podcasts since people tend to enunciate a bit more than usual and end up adding micro-silences that can easily add up into minutes.

It also tells you how much time that feature has saved you, which is kind of fun to see.

Interesting thought that audio clips (rather than a comment in text format) may remove some of the anonymity in social media situations, which would hopefully lead to slightly more civil discussions and a less toxic environment overall.

Is there limit on audio clip duration? Any controls on decibel level? I would hate if one clip ended up being like 4x louder than the rest out of nowhere.

Last item that bugs me in terms of social media audio -- Do you have any autoplay enabled? I truly hate when I unmute a single video in a newsfeed, which then unmutes all videos in the newsfeed and proceeds to auto-play them when I start scrolling again -- very, very frustrating (happens on Insta and Google News iirc)

Perhaps a try to mimic clubhouse I guess.

Wish you luck, because I'm not sure people want to share just voice.

And wasn't there some news that clubhouse doesn't work out?

As feedback though: I think only the audio track visualization is not very enticing.

Last time I tried one of these apps (stereo) I was immediately greeted with QAnon and 9/11 truther conspiracies. What will you do to prevent this type of vibe killing behavior?

If this is an app where you rely on users to report, that is a non starter for me.

androids?

Perhaps this post would be better with "Show HN" title.

We'll add it.

So you've reinvented SoundCloud?

Spoken word vs. music.

SoundCloud experimented with something called Ask years ago. I was one of the users they selected to answer spoken questions from the public with my voice.

https://blog.soundcloud.com/2011/05/16/this-week-in-tumblr-5... Scroll down to Wednesday. Users could have their own branded domain ala Bandcamp or Tumblr, mine was http://ask.hammyhavoc.com. Quite a few celebs of that moment got on board with it.

People hit an 'Ask' button in their browser, it uploaded their voice, I got it, I responded with mine, it got shared out on Twitter, and tagged anyone involved, which led to more interactions. Was pretty cool. Similar to Google's Cameo concept that they just killed off. Had a fancy UX for the era.

The questions and answers got archived on the subdomain and were accessed via SoundCloud's API.

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