AirChat is the social network that everyone is talking about. And it targets those voicemails that some people love and others hate.

This new “social walkie-talkie” works with voice messages, which the system transcribes so you can read them instead of listen to them.

Some will say: “Finally, someone came up with something like this!” Others, on the other hand, will lament and exclaim that “that’s the last thing we’ve been missing,” because perhaps if there’s one thing the new social network AirChat will generate, it’ll be completely polarized comments.

And this will provoke them for the simple reason that In AirChat, users publish voice messages. The platform has only just arrived and access is by invitation only, but it has become, perhaps for this reason, the new social network that the entire tech world is talking about.

The idea was put forward by Naval Ravikant, co-creator of investment platform AngelList, and Brian Norgard, head of product at Tinder. The interface is a sort of cross between Twitter (X) and Instagram, and features a vertical flow of blocks of text and images that have a special component: they (probably) weren’t written by users.

In fact, these texts These are transcriptions of voice messages., because that’s exactly what the platform does: it receives voice messages and then converts them into text so they can be read. It makes sense that any user can listen to them too, and the beauty of the service is precisely the combination of voice messages, which are popular on platforms such as WhatsApp (which will soon allow them to be transcribed), and text, which for many is preferred when it comes to absorption thoughts and ideas.

Ravikant commented to Bloomberg that for him, the tool is not about knowing what a person said while we’re not looking at the phone, but about “seeing what’s going on around you at the moment.” I compared it to that moment when you are at a house party and get into some kind of conversation. “It’s like a house party in my pocket.”

The tool is generating a lot of media interest, but so far the number of downloads is very modest: according to Sensor Tower, it has been downloaded more than 45,000 times since its launch in mid-2023.

Thus, almost a year passed, during which AirChat tiptoed Given the technology landscape, the recent popularity of voice messages that WhatsApp will allow to be automatically transcribed seems to have sparked interest in this proposal.

This interest has also spread among investors: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, “almost blindly sent the check,” admitted Ravikant, who commented that Altman is not involved in the development, but believes that the use of AI that deciphers these voice messages attracted his interest in this idea.

The AirChat controversy is very reminiscent of the one that once occurred with ClubHouse, a platform that allowed to create audio chats in which one or more “speakers” could discuss a topic while audience members listened and even eventually participated. The project is losing momentum: last year it cut its staff in half and became a traditional messaging app.

It remains to be seen whether the buzz surrounding AirChat will help launch the app and platform. Having a stream of voicemails waiting to be heard (or read) can be amazing if they’re interesting and lead to good discussion, but the idea as we say ends up being too similar to the one ClubHouse proposed and ended up were scattered.

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