Comment by idlephysicist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idlephysicist | Hacker News Reader

This looks pretty cool. This is no small feat.

I'm not actually sure if the product _and_ company are named flowy, or if the company is flowy and the product is named talksik (from the screen recording). Your post here doesn't clarify, but I will stick with flowy for this reply.

Though I think that you'll have some difficulties in getting sales (who knows I might be totally incorrect). I say that for a couple of reasons:

1. I think with only 24 hours of history it is somewhat limited, let's say I work in Boston, what about the Friday afternoon message that my Seattle colleague sends me as I'm finishing up, I'll want to replay it on Monday morning but it won't be there. A save for later function would be helpful.

2. Let's imagine I am a potential investor, I ask you "what does flowy have to offer if Slack implements a voice message feature?" What is your answer? From your website I honestly don't know, sure it's not Slack, so there are no Slack channels with hundreds of people and that one person who hits @here, and at some companies Slack is like a social media network without the moderation or block button. But Slack offers a lot, a rich ecosystem of plugins / bots for one.

3. Slack (and Teams et al.) offer a written history (leaving aside the caveat of the edit button for the moment), if I forget the specifics of what my colleague and I agreed on last week I can go back to Slack and read the message thread, if we use flowy that history is gone without transcribing the message.

One place that I can see this tool being somewhat useful is as a secondary mode of communication between a handful of engineers. Numerous times a week I consider uninstalling Slack from my work laptop, but that would leave my close colleagues high and dry. flowy _could_ be a useful tool in combatting that. Though given that a company is already paying for Slack / Teams etc. they would rightfully be hesitant to purchase a subscription to flowy.

I am glad to see that you have screen-sharing included already because that is so integral to so many peoples workflows.

Thank you! We really appreciate the cheers!

These are great points. talksik was just the line/display name of the user. We should clarify.

1. That's a great point. We have been juggling this recently. The pros of keeping it ephemeral is that people don't try to be so formal, and allow free-flowing conversation. And also most things resolve in a day, and if something is urgent, they will reach out again. However, the weekend case is interesting.

There is an additional anxiety if things stay for longer, however, we are considering allowing you to play back missed/unplayed clips older than 24 hours just like Snapchat.

2. This is what I would say: It's a new medium that closely mimics natural human conversation as opposed to the death by thousand cuts of any text based messaging platform. It's 2023, humans shouldn't type. We know that most people only have a 3-8 coworkers that are important and spend 80% of their time. They will use Slack for occasional social media-like usecase, but it's too noisy and flowy wins by doing less and being a place for focused execution.

In addition, Slack is all about being a knowledge base (as their acroynm), and they would have to cut everything and change their mission to get to the essense of human conversation that flowy is obsessed about.

Regardless, we beleive the market is huge and there is a cult of people who are dying for a "less is more" approach. Slack and Zoom and Loom are all due for this approach to team and human communication.

3. Great point again! We have live transcription and power search on the roadmap as this is a common objection. (audiobook vs. book argument)

Speech to text is pretty good these days, and it's 2023, we shouldn't be typing to talk in our opinion.

Search: "Play (or let me read) what Johnny told me about databases last month or so"

Me personally? I prefer sitting back and listening at 2x speed about complex topics so that I can look across the room and think instead of staring at my screen reading essays.

Sorry for the long response! You're points have been really helpful. Your last point is spot on! Flowy is only for you and your core team. We need to articulate that more clearly as it seems to be assumed that it's a Slack alternative from the getgo (although for startups, it may very well be with a email + flowy combination).

Thank you for your reply!

The death by a thousand cuts is real. Where I work we use Slack for nearly everything, we pretty much only have email addresses to login to Slack and AWS.

I have definitely found with the diverse bunch of people that I work with, that some people are very articulate in writing and some are very articulate in verbal communication. My personal experience is that people with English as a second language (in general) prefer written communication (they also write the best docs too). While native English speakers tend to prefer verbal communication for its ease and because of their comfort with it.

One piece of advice from me to you is to be careful of relying on speech to text for two main reasons: 1. Consider proper nouns, the products or tools that your customers are building or using. An example, I say "emacs", Siri on my phone thinks that should be "IMAX". Another example is `grep`, Siri thinks that ought to be "grape". Perhaps users would be able to define their proper nouns for flowy.

2. Despite having fluent English that is understandable to the vast majority of people, speech to text systems really struggle to understand me because I do not speak in a flat American accent. Perhaps it's just me :shrug:

Ahh yes that is a really good insight about people with English as a second language. This is why I believe that the lowest hanging fruit are international teams, as they typically talk 24/7 in their native tongue and are not fond of typing in Slack from my discussions.

Still, I have seen that these folks still have presentations in English and with diagraming and such, they are able to articulate something that's more digestible than full on documentation. I think loom sort of videos would still be good for these people to diagram and demo things. We want to add something like this with video + screen broadcasting.

Yep speech to text won't be fluent with technical terms. I'm hoping it does 80% of the job, and then constantly improve it based on what you mentioned. Thanks for the suggestions! Perhaps starting with editable speech to text would be viable, while trying hard not to promote async communication to a point where people aren't conversing naturally as humans do but constantly stopping, editing and typing.

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