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Laura Goode
Sometime over the weekend, Airchat co-founder Naval Raviking had to suspend new registrations on his app. After releasing a new edition on Friday, Airchat was temporarily overloaded with other people thirsty for a sneak peek (or audio snippet) of Silicon. The latest Valley. Ravikant fad had sent a small number of users unlimited invitations to share with friends, and it backfired.
“We’ve had an influx of new users, so we’re going to turn off the invite feature for a while,” Ravikant said Sunday.
Ravikant didn’t say that to WIRED, Twitter, or Threads. He said it in a short audio message on his own app, accompanied by a transcript. If a voice note falls in a forest and only early adopters in Silicon Valley are there to listen to it, does it make noise?Ravikant is convinced that this will be the case.
Airchat combines the feed facet of Twitter with the audio format of Clubhouse, an intimidating combination. After launching the app and being prompted to stick to certain contacts, you’re placed in a minimalist flow of text blocks. These blocks of text are transcriptions of audio bytes. The app automatically switches from one voice memo to the next, unless you think about pressing the Play/Pause button located in the back right corner of the app.
To post an audio note yourself, press and hold the Audio/Video button on the back of the app, speak, and release it. (From what I’ve noticed so far, no one uses the Video option. )Instead of posting publicly, there’s also the option of DMs. In any case, no seizure is permitted.
Airchat has some confusing elements. Voice memos are posted to the Airchat stream as soon as you release the Audio/Video button, so you’d better get it right the first time. There’s an option to delete after talking, if you make a decision that doesn’t satisfy you. With its byte, however, I didn’t notice the trash can icon until someone pointed it out to me. Sorting through multiple replies to a voice memo is far from intuitive. You can’t reply to each and every voice memo or see every reply in a given thread, and it’s not clear why. It’s also unclear how long a single Airchat message can last; One user told me that his limit was forty-five seconds, but in one test I was able to record for about a minute before opting to stop.
And all voice memos play at 2X speed by default, giving one a vaguely hyperactive vibe, I just wake up and it hits my Philz and then sinks into the cold. If you press and hold the Play/Pause button on the back right in the corner of the app, you can adjust the speed, which, again, is less than intuitive.
This new Airchat is a reincarnated edition of the app that launched without much fanfare last spring. Brian Norgard, Tinder’s longtime product lead, had first envisioned it as a peer-to-peer voicemail app. Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, joined Norgard a year ago and was “heavily involved” in the app’s progress a few months ago. Then, the new Airchat came to chat.
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Ravikant said most of Airchat’s investment came from his own fund, as well as Jeff Fagnan, founding partner of Accomplice Ventures. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman threw a check, kind of blindly,” Raviking said. He told me this in a public reaction on Airchat, after refusing to respond to my DMs and insisting that our verbal exchange deserves to be taken in public. “It can’t be an indirect interview based on the DM. It’s the old global that we’re leaving behind,” he told me. (In both the old and new global, conducting an interview synchronously is always at most. . . preferable).
So far, the Airchat thread is filled with tech enthusiasts, early adopters, venture capitalists, and journalists. There are many Bitcoin posts from Winefluencer Gary Vaynerchuk are on the app. The same goes for Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator. Over the weekend, Tan posted, “Breakfast is the first step to greatness. What are you having for dinner this morning? It has more than 96 audio responses. Social media is back, baby.
Airchat has AI. What doesn’t? The app’s rollout, however, is right. The transcripts of each and every Airchat voice memo appear almost without delay and are good. Pronounced “Ums” appear in the transcript, but other slight pauses and filler words are removed. When I used the word “Airchat” in a voice memo, it first appeared as “error chat” and then was temporarily fixed automatically. The app also recognizes and transcribes other languages; One user spoke in Russian and the transcript appeared to be in Cyrillic, while another spoke in Moroccan Arabic, known as darija, and then marveled at a voice note tracking the quality of the transcript.
So what will happen to all that voice information?Ravikant claimed that the creators of Airchat have no plans to exert a giant style of language on users’ voices and create “weird artificial clones of you. “He also said he wouldn’t sell Airchat’s know-how to other corporate-building AI styles, especially considering the app. and the uncategorized nature of their knowledge. However, Airchat will most likely use knowledge of people’s voices to exert a style that complements its own audio and transcription features. If you’re registered, you’ve registered.
I asked Ravikant if an AI company could still extract information from Airchat without a formal agreement. He replied, “We’ll block them, we’ll process them, and then if I have a battery of orbital satellites, we’ll neutralize them from orbit. “. »
Airchat’s monetization plans are less clear. Ravikant didn’t say anything about charging for access. The existing format turns out to lend itself to audio ads, but there’s a threat that the app won’t be able to be heard.
There’s also the content moderation factor when people’s unfiltered sound bytes are posted to a timeline the moment they let go of the virtual microphone. A troll appeared to be pushing the boundaries on Sunday, cursing the app’s founders and calling it “garbage. “” and, in the same amount of words, tell the founders to, ahem, give them a blowjob. The voice memo is still there. The same goes for a thread in which two users tell a story about “gay Jewish teenagers” and “neo-Nazi killers. “
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Over the weekend, an Airchat channel was created with the simple name: War. More than 529 members have joined. Topics of verbal exchange ranged from the Iranian drone attack on Israel to the war in Gaza and tensions between the United States and China. People shared strong criticisms, unconfirmed news reports, claims that they had “done some research” on “economic weapons. “,” and predictions about the value of oil. ” Call for more unwarranted reviews from venture capital firms on geopolitics,” said one Airchatter.
The conversation, while asynchronous, was reminiscent of what was discovered on Clubhouse, the live audio chat app that went viral during the pandemic before catching fire. It also faced moderation issues similar to those of an audio platform. Last fall, Clubhouse was relaunched as. . . instead of asynchronous voice memos. Never say there are no new ideas.
Airchat’s stated policies emphasize self-moderation — you can mute or block a person, but it’s a remote solution to the thornier challenge of spreading destructive content or incorrect information on an app. It also states that it will not remove other people from the entire platform for polite word warfare or for political reasons, but will remove other people for harassment, impersonation, misconduct, and illegal content.
I scanned Ravikant’s Airchat feed to see if he had posted anything more explicit about moderation. I couldn’t locate it, but I found out that by Sunday afternoon it had reopened the app for iOS users. He also had trouble sleeping. ” Oh my God, I have to go to sleep,” she posted. His voice tired. But I have the most productive verbal exchange in DMs. This is where I have the most productive verbal exchange.
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