[HN Gopher] Verbz: Voice-based messaging
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Verbz: Voice-based messaging
Author : rekoros
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-02-25 17:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.verbz.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.verbz.ai)
| geigster wrote:
| Thanks @rekoros!
|
| I'm one of the makers, happy to answer questions!
| gungorbasa wrote:
| Yoo, I am here as well folks. I am one of the devs. Ask me
| anything you want :) Happy to answer.
| dilawar wrote:
| Neat idea. How did you manage to support over 100 languages? Are
| you collecting your own voice data for all languages or relying
| on the third party?
| geigster wrote:
| We use a major platform, and our customer data is not shared to
| train their system.
|
| It limits our flexibility a bit, but it means our customer's
| data isn't being farmed off to a tagging factory somewhere.
|
| No small startup can afford to do more than 1 or 2 languages,
| infrastructure cost overhead is incredible and the platforms
| keep moving faster and faster.
|
| We think of these engines as cloud services, we're productizing
| infrastructure.
| ccakes wrote:
| Any way to export the notes via some kind of API?
| geigster wrote:
| Export feature this week, Zapier really soon, API later this
| year.
|
| We want to be your interface to create and validate, so we're
| going to help get your data out and where ever it needs to go.
|
| One day soon we'd like for you to be able to build your own
| workflows, validation and enrichment rules. That's a little
| while off, but that's where we're heading.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I went through the home page and I can't actually understand what
| this is. Voice dictated messaging? That also somehow integrates
| with todos? Or a document editor that voice transcription based?
|
| Can someone please explain this to me in plain text what it is
| and who it's for? Because in an office (it seems like a B2B
| tool), voice either reveals things you don't want heard or annoys
| those around you (never mind the other issues with speech
| recognition and voice based interfaces).
| faitswulff wrote:
| I think it's Slack for voicemail.
| geigster wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! It's a new concept and we have a ways
| to go to get better at explaining it. Easiest to just try :)
|
| We're experimenting with dictation that keeps the audio, allows
| you to format it in a way that can be read (or used by other
| systems... like project management tools or CRM). You built up
| notes ad tasks with lots of little grabs. Like writing, you
| talk in bursts.
|
| Keeping the audio means you don't have to worry as much about
| transcription errors or misunderstood tone. You can be very
| fast and casual - unlike written - and the audio is a safety
| net.
|
| Voice recording takes a little getting used to, a lot of execs
| currently record voice memos for their EA... who then have to
| type it into something useful.
|
| We hope to make this behaviour accessible to everyone, because
| it's fast and kind of amazing when it works.
| pgt wrote:
| Augmented Audio?
| geigster wrote:
| Nice!
| donio wrote:
| > Easiest to just try
|
| Nope, easiest is to skip this and move along.
|
| The HN frontpage gets you 15 seconds of attention. It's worth
| taking the time to come up with a 15 second pitch before you
| go live.
| luplex wrote:
| Do you have plans to integrate with matrix?
|
| Or are you only selling to teams for internal communication?
| MattLaurie wrote:
| I would love to see what we build integrate with Matrix but
| also really any place where work happens. As a startup we have
| just had to pick what we can concentrate on.
|
| I think the recent advances with voice tech really gives us all
| a great opportunity to rethink how we design input and
| interactions for the systems we use day to day.
|
| For example, I remember when a mouse was an optional peripheral
| on PCs but now I just can't imagine not relying on some sort of
| trackpad or mouse. I really think we're at that point with
| voice changing how interact with systems, and Verbz is our
| first steps at realising that.
| louis_solenica wrote:
| Q: Do tasks/reminders get sent by email (just in case team
| members aren't on the platform)?
| geigster wrote:
| They sure do! You can tag anyone, not just users!
| pretty_bubbles wrote:
| OMG, the wave animation on the page is killing my CPU :) I'm
| pretty sure there has to be a better way.
| geigster wrote:
| Ouch.. you're right. Thanks for flagging it. The new page went
| up over night, and we missed this.
|
| The team is gonna get on that. No good excuse for heavy
| graphics, that's not how we roll.
| throwanem wrote:
| Wow, same. Are they generating the SVG in realtime? As simple
| as it looks, there's no excuse for it eating a whole core.
| daaammn wrote:
| Wow! Very good to see Verbz here! I'm one of the iOS Devs, been
| working at Verbz for more than a year. Any questions, don't
| hesitate!
| difosfor wrote:
| What kind of people or jobs would this be useful for? It's not
| replacing Slack or Jira or anything I can think of right now.
| harryf wrote:
| Very cool - dictation seems almost perfect.
|
| Some key things to get my to commit...
|
| - feeling very "locked in" already ... ability to export notes is
| important
|
| - search! With results ranked by a mix of most recent, most read
| ... relevancy also matters but not as much as the recency (a note
| I just created) or most read (a note I keep going back to) ...
| the latter implies keeping track of how often I read notes
|
| - sharing outside of the app eg to Signal / WhatsApp
|
| Side note: I'm a big Evernote user for personal use only.
| Positioning against Evernote's ecosystem will be tough if you
| want to make a walled garden
| MattLaurie wrote:
| Great points really appreciate your thoughts here.
|
| Data export is what we've been working on right now. What would
| be the first integration point you'd like to see? We've been
| discussing internally where to put our focus right now.
|
| Fully agree with what you mentioned on search.
| harryf wrote:
| > What would be the first integration point you'd like to
| see? We've been discussing internally where to put our focus
| right now.
|
| Think the first thing would be just some way to share read-
| only via a URL with people that don't have the app - unique
| ID but otherwise public - that's then easy to share with
| messaging apps - WhatsApp most of all I guess
| MattLaurie wrote:
| Hi all, I'm Matt, Verbz CTO, and I'm really humbled to see us
| here today! I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about
| what we are building with Verbz and also anything else about
| working with voice.
| wired_devil wrote:
| What languages are available? Great concept btw, i don't think
| i have ever seen an app like that...
| MattLaurie wrote:
| Thanks, really appreciate it! We support about 125 languages
| and variants.
| Gaishan wrote:
| @geigster describes this well;
|
| "We're not trying to replace Slack for huge operations teams, we
| want highly mobile or highly personal teams to communicate and
| manage their work better."
| egghese wrote:
| Impressive that it works well with my native language Malayalam.
| However, it would be nice to notify the user that adding a
| profile picture is required to sign up. My girlfriend who is non-
| tech savvy was confused + stuck at the page.
| MattLaurie wrote:
| We're making a hotfix right now to solve that required profile
| photo issue.
| gungorbasa wrote:
| Thank you for your valuable feedback. We are working on it and
| we will address the issues as soon as possible :)
| foolinaround wrote:
| Are you planning for android version?
| MattLaurie wrote:
| It's definitely coming, but as a small startup we've just had
| to focus our efforts up to this point. I use Android as my
| daily phone so I'm keen to have it available also.
| rekoros wrote:
| This thing is pretty awesome. One problem I have is switching
| between languages in different rooms - I think it should be a
| room-level setting.
| geigster wrote:
| This is a great idea, we hadn't thought of that. We speak 6
| languages in our team, so its come up a lot.
|
| We played around with passive detection, but it's still too
| flakey and ASR breaks down entirely if you start pronouncing
| names with a different languages pronunciation.
|
| English - Hugo - fine! English - Portuguese pronunciation - Ugo
| - 100% fail. Portuguese - Ugo - fine!
|
| Awesome feedback!
| rasengan wrote:
| I agree. It's amazing.
|
| > If you're tapping keys, you're wasting time. With Verbz,
| you'll collaborate at an incredible 170 words per minute.
| That's 8x faster than texting!
|
| Just a thought, according to most typing tests I'm at 150WPM.
| If Verbz has no errors it's better - if it does have errors I
| may not be the target niche.
|
| That said, bravo as this will help most people who aren't adept
| at typing improve their productivity.
| gavanwilhite wrote:
| Random feedback, but the ad-hoc task assignment examples with
| specific dates seems counter to the type of tasking and
| leadership I've seen be the most successful.
|
| This may be normal in other industries, but it's tilted towards
| the boss's convenience, rather than the IC's. (It's not very
| Leader / Leader vs Leader / Follower for example)
| geigster wrote:
| You nailed it! Internally we don't really assign dates either,
| but certain user profiles like the _idea_.. if not the practice
| :)
|
| One of those marketing features- like buying a plane ticket
| with Siri.. Cool idea, _never happened_ :)
|
| We plan to get a lot smarter with enrichment in future - like
| referring to docs or projects to bring them into the
| conversation.
| gavanwilhite wrote:
| Yeah it might be as simple as changing it to "adding the task
| to a backlog" or 'next sprint' or whatnot. Again a minor
| thing, I've just been thinking a lot about leadership
| techniques recently.
| hugolisbon wrote:
| If I'm moving my mentor conversations with startup founders from
| WhatsApp to Verbz, what is your value prop on privacy vs.
| WhatsApp privacy?
| geigster wrote:
| We're in beta so it's free. But we'll monetize by keeping your
| data safe, and offering premium services. Not selling it to ad
| networks :)
| underwater wrote:
| An app for team collaboration that only works on one mobile OS?
| Should we start asking what phone people have at job interviews?
| Gaishan wrote:
| Android's coming. Join the waitlist;
| https://www.verbz.ai/android-vip
| underwater wrote:
| "Coming" could mean anything from pending a Play Store
| approval to a vague plan to hire a team once you get
| traction. I noticed LinkedIn page shows you have four iOS
| developers and zero Android.
|
| I don't mean to pick on Verbz. I'm just upset that after
| 30ish years of consumer apps everything is still so
| fragmented. Launching an app that reaches most users
| shouldn't be such a difficult task.
| dmje wrote:
| Or you could ring
| geigster wrote:
| Haha :) But then you have to stop and listen... and write it
| down somewhere :) ASYNC FTW.
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