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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 p

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).

idlephysicist 4y ago
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:
- talksik 4y ago
  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.

idlephysicist 4y ago

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:

talksik 4y ago
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.