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Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

It took me a while to figure out what, exactly, this is. The front page mostly talks about benefits rather than features and the demo page (/demo) does not contain a demo - just a few minutes of more pitching. You need to continue on to the /how-it-works page to see what the product actually does: https://www.flowy.live/how-it-works

To save people a click, it's a pretty polished-looking tool that that allows always-on voice chat amongst a small team. It's a bit better than it sounds: you can opt in to specific channels, there's a nice system for playing back audio you missed or previously heard, and there's a priority system for channels.

It'd be absolutely ruinous for productivity to use every day, but I could see using it during a hackathon or during incident response as a way to increase communication bandwidth temporarily.

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> nice system for playing back audio you missed

For something that's in a similar space as this (seriously, async meetings are pretty great), http://loom.com is pretty great. (don't work there, not even a paying customer, but even then it's transformed the way I work.)

Interesting - I'm a medium user of Loom, but I've not used it for anything like async meetings. I just use it for sharing quick product demos or walkthroughs of a section of UI. You're using it to replace meetings in some way?

Loom's lowered friction to making a screen share video is great. It supplants an email or a slack message or a voice memo when what really needs to be communicated is me clicking something on my screen.

But while I'm holding this loom-shaped hammer, the weekly status meeting is now this async thing where everyone makes a video to report their status and then we can all watch each other's report asynchronously instead of everybody having to be in the same virtual room at the same time. That's all, nothing earth-shattering, I don't think.

Just sending and receiving video updates you can imagine you and your colleagues are at other ends of the solar system.

This is 1000% horrible than slack. Reading is much faster than listening. I can't imagine having the need to go back to millions of audio clips

where formats like YouTube make it easy to drawl on forever, loom gets it - they default to 1.25 x playback speed. But as they say, a pictures worth a thousand words. What's a better feeling when giving your status report? a sentence saying you closed ticket xyz? Or being able to demo what you did on your screen to your peers? Of course, you do you; it goes to company culture - there's no one size fits all. But where the team meeting was previously a zoom call that you all had to be online at the exact same for, async loom meeting is worth trying out!

What if there was live transcription and history to search? AI search, which is in the roadmap.

Our belief is that it's 2023 we shouldn't have to type anymore and speech to text is pretty good these days for those folks who like reading books vs listening to audiobooks. I prefer sitting back on my chair and listening to stuff at 1.5x speed.

We have something really cool in the pipeline.

Voice + video + screen real-time clips.

Your pair engineer can hold a button down and release and on my computer, I see it play on the bottom right of my screen. A loom killer in my opinion

How is this different from just having a teams meeting left open?

I guess this one is like having up to 3 teams meeting open at the same time and you can actually choose to listen back audios messages.

But you can also do audio/video clips on teams or slack, the main difference being the UI.

Sounds like having the option of listening to voicemails or reading a text - personally I'd prefer a text history to skim through.

Yep, the main difference being that this enables more conversational flow.

You are not clicking play on 20 different clips, it smoothens clips together to make it like one conversation when it comes to playback. Many other elements when it comes to playback that are different than a typical thread on other platforms which would include files, code, text, voice clips, all in one stream which makes it death by thousand cuts in relation to a smooth human to human conversation.

Thank you for this! Really helped others out

Would you say there is not enough clear messaging to articulate that this is for you and just your core people and not everyone in the company? That Slack and everything serves a purpose but you and your core team needs to be on the same page. Or would that still decrease productivity in your opinion.

I think the message "this is just for your core team" comes across pretty loud and clear. What took me a while to figure out is "what the heck even is this?" Maybe "Walkie-talkie for developers" is more evocative to other people, but I'd never heard of "Walkie-talkie" in the context of software. It took quite a while to see what this product actually does ("always-on voice chat with opt-in channels").

As for productivity, I don't think the size of the group changes the fundamental problem. For a lot of people, having the possibility of a coworker popping in and disrupting your concentration would be super annoying, even if it is only your immediate team. That's why, in open offices, people often wear big headphones to signal "don't talk to me unless it's important, I'm focusing right now."

That's why I think this would be super useful in cases where I'm willing to sacrifice focus for high-bandwidth communication. For example, during a company hackathon where I'm working with a small team and we're all batting around ideas super quickly. Or during an outage where the team trying to fix things needs to communicate fast. But for day-to-day work, even with my immediate team, I'd much rather rely on asynchronous and written communication that won't interrupt what I'm working on.

Thanks for this!

That makes sense, we need to try different messaging to hit it on the nail, but "walkie-talkie" seems to click as a decent initial introduction.

I totally agree. When I'm in flow state, I don't want anything to disturb me. Hence, I need a power switch, which is the power button in the widget. I'm a minimalist myself and having an off switch has been awesome for me, as compared to all of the configuration I have to do with Slack notifications to have it do what I want.

Thoughts on this?

> always-on voice chat

omg this sounds like hell.

The open-office experience, now in the comfort of your own home.

Perhaps it's not articulated well, flowy is for you and say your core 3-8 people.

You choose who you get to hear "always-on" just like you choose which channels you tune into on a real walkie-talkie.

There is no global presence as that increases the anxiety of always-on.

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