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Woice.me – async voice communication for teams: work, at your own pace
- buf 6y agoDiscord for companies. I like it.
- nsx147 6y agoWhy don’t more companies simply use discord? Slack is discord for boomers
- puttycat 6y agoCan you elaborate? What is the difference?
- GekkePrutser 6y agoTencent for one. Also, why would you move if the app is not much different? A migration is costly and Discord doesn't offer anything substantial over Slack. I see most companies now gravitating towards MS Teams instead. As it comes for free with O365 and performs adequately. I still prefer Slack with its joinable channels and higher screen density but I have to make do with teams as the company I work for is also one of those who have dropped Slack for Teams.
- cat199 6y agoone could just as simply make the inverse statement without qualifying it: "Why don't more gamers simply use slack? Discord is slack for zoomers" - although having used both, the feature set is not identical, so ignoring the obvious generation predjudice, both statements are equally invalid.
- vincentmarle 6y agoWe recently tried to use Discord to set up community servers for our users. Turns out that Discord has an extremely sensitive bot detection filter which made it hard for a lot of users to get into the server in the first place. Of course, we can’t turn it off and Discord wasn’t interested in helping us, so we had to scrap the integration and find another solution. TLDR: Wouldn’t recommend Discord for a professional use case
- mdotmertens 6y agoThis seems to be awesome. 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.
- markdown 6y agoIs this "voice me" in an Indian accent?
- blendorwhat 6y agoHey markdown, my mother tounge is Albanian & I speak Slovenian on native level - if looking for accent, I'd say probably more Slavic than Indian :)
- markdown 6y agoAhh ok. I wondered because I spent a few years in India and many of my friends pronounced v words with w sounds.
- bruceb 6y agoSeems interesting Not to be negative, would be annoying to tell anyone about this app, all the extra effort to make sure they understand the name is woice.me and not voice.me
- shankr 6y agoVvoice
- yawnxyz 6y agoreminds me of using Wwise... (which is coincidentally also audio programming)
- totetsu 6y agoWoe is thee who tries to explain woiceme
- nsomaru 6y agoNitpick: it seems it should be “woe unto thee”
- puttycat 6y agoBe vewy, vewy, quiet. I'm hunting wabbits!
- azangru 6y agoThis fits their logo perfectly!
- ryannevius 6y agoOr "wolce"...The "i" in the logo is quite similar to the "l" in "Clover" (in the demo), and all of the "l"s in headings.
- CiTyBear 6y agoSeems great. The pricing distrubs me. 75$/month this really nothing for big organization with 1000+ employee. 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
- jack_riminton 6y agoYeah reverse searching the photos brings up: 1) Christopher Hettinger -> A fake person who is selling medicine https://finvsfin.com/rogaine-vs-minoxidil/ https://finvsfin.com/rogaine-vs-minoxidil/ 2) Ben Schwartzman -> A fake testimonial on an education site https://coursecentral.co.uk/student-success-stories/ https://coursecentral.co.uk/student-success-stories/ 3) Isabelle Desjardins -> A random, fake student? https://polban.academia.edu/DianneCastaldo https://polban.academia.edu/DianneCastaldo etc. etc. If you're going to fake it til you make it, at least choose images that aren't so easily verifiable!
- geniium 6y agoOh my god! Thanks for digging out
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- GekkePrutser 6y agoPersonally I hate it when people dump voice messages on me on whatsapp/telegram, and I tend to ignore them. An app that stimulates this behaviour even more... Just nope. And transcription doesn't work well enough so you still have to listen to the messages.
- the_duke 6y agoNo, please, no. 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.
- camhart 6y agoYou're acting like email has to go away if this gets used. Simply use both. There certainly are use cases for this and hearing someones voice can convey things that words can't.
- christophilus 6y agoI agree for with your reasons, but if they add a transcript feature, and allow 2x playback speed, this could be handy. You could choose to read vs listen / watch. There is a advantage to voice / video which is that you can detect tone and nuance much more readily. You can also listen to your messages while running or driving.
- loloquwowndueo 6y agoWhen you’re driving please focus on driving or you’ll end up killing someone. If you’re paying attention to driving you’re not paying (full) attention to messages; you’ll have to listen to them again once you stop. So just use email :)
- blendorwhat 6y agoI agree loloquwowndueo: safety first - don't text and drive or do anything distracting while driving, including listening to work-related voice messages.
- mritchie712 6y agoMore mature version of this: https://www.yac.com/ https://www.yac.com/
- hunter-2 6y agoInteresting product. But I can see why other HNers are not so kind to it. It's probably because they are not the target market you should be going after. Nobody is going to switch from Slack to Woice simply because they can now send an audio message - I am sure there apps on Slack that can do this. 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.
- cat199 6y agothis reminds me of the phones that had the 'chirp' / push-to-talk feature that were popular in the early 2000's - which were hugely popular with people in various trades, service industries, etc - think telecom repair crews, construction crews, live event staff, etc - jobs where permanence of the information is not so important but realtime/async/hands-free was. could be a good fit.
- wildermuthn 6y agoUpvoted for trying something that I think most people would dismiss as a solution to a problem no one has. The best ideas are the ones most people think are bad. 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!
- 6y ago
- jack_riminton 6y agoAs a millennial who is allergic to voicemail, the thought of having to listen to long messages from a boss makes my toes curl The benefit of the written word is that it can be scanned, searched, cut, copied etc.
- ThinkBeat 6y agoI can understand an asyncornous voice messaging platform, basically telephone answering machine 3.0. 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.
- k__ 6y agoI working on an async communication tool too, but voice messages would be one of the last features I'd add to it. I already hate it in my private life, why would I want such a thing at work
- timsco 6y agoNeat product. Apologies for the nitpick but I noticed a typo on https://www.woice.me/pricing https://www.woice.me/pricing. "nibmle" should be "nimble".
- jeswin 6y agoSorry, IMHO this breaks Show HN guidelines. All I see is a landing page. "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 https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- mritchie712 6y agoagreed, they explicitly state they haven't launched yet: "Join the waitlist now and get FREE 3 months of early access when we launch!"
- dang 6y agoYou're quite right. I've taken Show HN out of the title now. Thanks! In the future, if anyone notices a case of this and has a minute to email hn@ycombinator.com, it helps a lot to let us know!
- Mortiffer 6y agoThis app idea seems to be in the zeitgeist. https://www.yac.com/ https://www.yac.com/ same thing also released recently
- breakfastduck 6y agoThis takes every single possible advantage of async text chat via slack / matrix / whatever and strips it away. 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.
- 0xdeadfeed 6y agoSo like Slack, but even more annoying/distracting? Nope!
- vxNsr 6y agoThe only interesting thing here is the automatic recording/transcription of meetings.
- jack_riminton 6y agoAnd it's not even shipped yet. I'd love to see how accurate it is
- subpixel 6y ago> Give yourself greater peace of mind with the woice transcription feature. The first thing I do in every meeting is ban the transcription bot one of my colleagues set up.
- ComodoHacker 6y agoAny advantages over what Telegram has?
- blendorwhat 6y agoHey everybody! 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.
- CharlesW 6y agoIs the hypothesis that, even though we've had ubiquitous async voice service communication ("voicemail") for decades, that it'd be better if we had yet another way to do it? I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing.
- sidyapa 6y agoYes, please, yes. 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.