By Yuvraj Malik
(Reuters) – Enterprise capitalist Naval Ravikant has rolled out a social media app centered round speaking by voice notes, trying to problem the dominance of text-based platforms akin to Elon Musk-owned X and Meta Platforms’ Threads.
AirChat has seen 1000’s of downloads throughout iOS and Android since its Friday launch and sparked a surge of requests on on-line platforms for entry to the app that’s presently invite-only.
Based by Ravikant and former Tinder product chief Brian Norgard, the app is banking on voice interactions to vary the best way individuals join on-line regardless of the lackluster progress of comparable platforms akin to pandemic-era darling Clubhouse.
AirChat was the Twenty third-most widespread social media app within the U.S. on Apple’s App Retailer as of Monday, based on market analysis agency SensorTower.
It has a design that mirrors most social media platforms and permits customers to publish, scroll by a feed, and message different customers privately, within the type of audio recordings.
The voice notes play robotically and will be paused. The app additionally generates transcripts of the notes concurrently.
Ravikant, who has made seed investments in corporations together with Uber Applied sciences, argues that voice is a extra intimate medium for dialog than textual content.
“People are all meant to get together with different people, it simply requires the pure voice,” he posted on AirChat.
The app has seen optimistic reception from social media customers.
“The pliability in reworking from one medium to a different opens fascinating new doorways for capturing and sharing concepts on-line,” one consumer posted on X. Others stated they discovered the voice-to-text transcription to be correct in preliminary exams.
Nonetheless, different new social media startups have struggled to attract vital consumer bases.
Mastodon had 1.5 million month-to-month lively customers and Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky amassed 2 million, based on a report revealed by MIT Expertise Overview in January.
A earlier model of AirChat was launched final yr.
(Reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Modifying by Devika Syamnath)
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters information service. ThePrint holds no responsibilty for its content material.
