Super agree that new modes of conferencing software are needed -- I see similar ideas, "drifting locational chats" come up a lot, but it's never seemed to 'fix'

Super agree that new modes of conferencing software are needed -- I see similar ideas, "drifting locational chats" come up a lot, but it's never seemed to 'fix' things in my experience. I'm personally an advocate for more asynchronous communication, for less video (I find video very tiring and time-consuming), and for more audio at work. I feel audio is the sweet spot of informal, low effort, and still more emotionally engaging than pure text. I believe this so much that I'm actually building a chat application, called heysync[1]. It's somewhere between slack and discord in terms of features, but intended to allow for asynchronous, conversational audio to fit directly into the way teams already chat. You speak, and it can play live to any teammate who's listening right then, but it also records the audio, and transcribes it inline with regular chat, so the message can be easily read or listened to in-context later, allowing for true asynchronous audio conversations without dedicated audio rooms. Of course, you can also just chat via text like you would with slack or IRC. There is an early info site up at https://heysync.chat/ https://heysync.chat/ if anyone's interested in this idea :)