5 ms·

Would you use an app like Gmail, that allows you to send audios like WhatsApp?

• svcrunch 5y ago
  Hi Nicolás, I think that this could be very useful, but you need two additional elements: 1. Automatic transcription of the audio, so that you can read whatever was said. 2. A good search over the transcriptions. So if I ask, "When am I meeting Brian", it can match a message from Brian that says "I'll see you for pizza tomorrow at 4pm".
  • Teko 5y ago
    Exactly! I didn't want to make the post too long, but that's one of the ideas, yes. In fact, there are others, such as translating in real time the audio of the message in any language. For example, let's say we send a quote to China and the supplier doesn't speak English or Spanish. With this app, he could send us a short message in his language and as a user I can translate it, reply in my language and the supplier will hear it translated in his language. It is very important what you say that the content of the message can be searched correctly. I believe that with the technology that search engines have today, this can be achieved. What other ideas? Thank you!
    • svcrunch 5y ago
      Cross-language fuzzy search can be handled by ZIR Semantic Search (I'm the cofounder, btw :-) Feel free to try the Covid-19 FAQ demo (https://zir-ai.com/demo#covid https://zir-ai.com/demo#covid) with queries in Spanish or Chinese. For translations, you could use Microsoft or Google translation APIs. With these, it should be possible to create a compelling demo without a lot of NLP and ML expertise.
• bradknowles 5y ago
  So, why not just use WhatsApp? The thing that makes gmail near ubiquitous is that e-mail is even more ubiquitous. And e-mail existed for a couple of decades before gmail came onto the scene. There have been many, many different companies to come along and try to corner the market on communications, but the Internet in general didn’t really start taking off until 1995 and e-mail followed quickly thereafter because it was the most common communication method that could be reasonably trusted to work everywhere. Everybody set up e-mail gateways to everything else, because e-mail was the lowest common denominator. Frankly, it still is. But human communications is 80-90% non-verbal, and it’s much more about the tone of voice and the body language than it is about the words themselves that are expressed. And written literacy is still a huge problem in many places in the world. So, I get why you want to replace e-mail. But written communications is relatively durable. And compact. And easy to process relatively quickly. And non-linear, so that if you missed something that was expressed earlier, you can just scan back to that passage in moments. Before we had writing, we had verbal communication and stories that were passed down from one person to the next. But they weren’t very durable, and the stories frequently changed in the retelling. And verbal communication is linear — it’s harder to skip ahead or skip backward and find the exact right passage. Moreover, humans are generally very visual creatures, and audio-only communications gives up a lot of the benefits of written communications without having the benefit of video communications. In addition, humans typically process audio messages much slower than they can read. Sure, there’s a lot of extra context that you can convey with audio, but the core words themselves cannot be absorbed nearly as quickly. When you get to audio recording, now bandwidth of recording and storage and transmission starts to become a factor. Sure, you can transcribe audio, but then why didn’t you just use written communications to begin with? Video communications has all the same durability problems and recording and storage and transmission problems that audio has, but raised by orders of magnitude. But at least you then get to make use of all those additional non-verbal communications aspects that humans are genetically designed to process. On the other hand, video without audio is pretty useless, so now you’ve just added a whole ‘nother dimension to your set of problems you have to deal with. Reading the MLK “I have a dream” speech is one thing. Hearing it is another. Watching it is yet another. But each of these systems builds on top of the preceding one, and when used together they can further enrich the message you want to convey. That’s called multimedia. And you can send audio messages via e-mail. Or video messages. Or you can send links to audio or video messages. Radio stations are a purely audio form of communication. They still exist, they do have their place. TV stations are a audio-visual form of communication, and they also have their place. But so does the written word. And e-mail can serve all of those forms of communication, either directly or via attachments or links. And gmail is, like it or not, the current biggest e-mail provider. In 1995, that was AOL. But times change. So, you’ve got to figure out what you can do that gmail can’t. What AOL couldn’t. What can’t be done by either Facebook or WhatsApp.