Airchat is a new conversational audio app.
If you’ve been under a rock over the weekend, you might have disregarded an invite from your friends to join Airchat. If you weren’t, you clicked on the link, downloaded the app, and started exploring.
Remember Clubhouse? Yeah, that social audio app many of us joined during the pandemic, which had a meteoric rise and fall. Air Chat has a hint of Clubhouse in it, but it feels new and different.
In a post-pandemic era where we crave connection, audio is becoming increasingly important. Podcasts, for example, continue to grow and thrive despite some correction in the markets. It does seem that now is a perfect time for a new social app to enter the game to fill a void. Will Airchat revive the days of social audio and live audio?
Live audio remains popular on platforms like X, but users looking for new avenues for conversation and content might gravitate to Airchat.
“Social audio never went away. Apps like Clubhouse died because while they had the social audio component, they didn't really have the social networking of things like Twitter. Since then, Twitter Spaces has been pretty consistent and growing,” said Adam Soccolich, an entrepreneur who runs The Best of Live Audio on X. “ I think that's where most of the focus and attention of it has been. Now with apps like AirChat, I think are really unique because you can still bring back that aspect of social audio with the social network and the text-based applications as well.”
For Soccolich, on X, you have text, but it’s hard to interpret emotion through text. You need to hear it in people’s voices. For him, in video platforms like YouTube you get all the emotions and all the audio and video, but some people just don’t want to video.
For him, however, you go to the other extreme. You do video like YouTube, and while you get all the emotions and all the audio and all the video, some people just don't want to be on video. They don't want the visuals. But audio lends itself as a good medium where you get that expression from people's voices.
Why Air Chat Was Created
Early adopters are joining Airchat and testing the waters of this new conversational network. This ... [+]
Airchat comes from the minds of Brian Norgard, Tinder’s former Chief Product Officer, and Silicon Valley fixture Naval Ravikant.
According to Norgard, Airchat is not a social network. It is a conversational network.
Both he and Ravikant are extremely passionate about conversation, meeting new people, and talking about interesting things, which seemed virtually impossible on the consumer internet. So, they set out to build an app that does just that.
“This is not a broadcast medium. This is a conversational medium. It's very different. We haven't seen anything like this, so be advised, there's a lot to learn,” he added via Airchat audio direct message. “Everybody loves to talk to new people, but it is incredibly hard to do so, so it was our design intention to try to solve that problem.
We aim for the product to be simple, intimate, and evocative.”
He added, “What I saw during my time as Tinder's CPO is that people are craving new connections on the internet, and we want to build a new way to accomplish this goal.
We really think civil conversation can bring people together in a time when the world is probably the most divided.”
Hot Takes From Early Adopters
You can talk into the app and you can listen and read users' posts.
As an influx of first adopters joins the conversational network, many of them are voicing their opinions about Airchat. From positive reviews about the app’s voice recognition and advanced transcription and correction capabilities to learning a new UX, most of the early reviews are positive and offer a glimpse into how Airchat might find a unique place in today’s tech space.
"In the expanding landscape of social media and content creation, the new audio platform Airchat has ignited a wave of early enthusiasm. Yet, as we navigate its potential, it remains uncertain whether this platform represents a mere feature or if it embodies a comprehensive solution for modern communication,” said Greg Kahn, president and CEO of Emerging Tech Exchange and co-founder of AI Trail Blazers. “As Airchat evolves, users may need to tread carefully and become ever more vigilant in their choice of words to thrive in this dynamic medium.
Air Chat user Dragaan commented on an Airchat thread the following:
“Personally, I hope this creates a new lane for social media, because public voice memos and storytelling could behave way more differently on here than any other app. Every post or reply requires a bit more presence and engagement than typing a few words.”
For his part, user Ridd, founding designer at Maven and the creator of dive.club, thinks the fact that Air Chat is asynchronous can be a big unlock.
“I think when you just have a big open room on X, it's low time to value, and it often becomes quite rambly. I bounce out of every live room that I hop into, whereas Air Chat is so much more bite-size, and it's more directly connected to the people that you care about. It’s a little bit more intimate, and you're getting deeper access to people that you generally want to hear from, rather than more topic-based rooms.”
He highlighted that the asynchronous nature of Airchat also forces people to take an extra 20 to 30 seconds to think about what they're going to say, which leads to much more thoughtful, concise replies.
Timing is Everything
Airchat was started by Brian Norgard, Tinder’s former Chief Product Officer, and Naval Ravikant.
When Clubhouse became a hit, folks were stuck at home and craving connection. While we’re out of the pandemic and not stuck at home, we’re craving connection more than ever.
Product timing can mean everything when launching a new app. Having the ability to both read and listen to posts is very valuable for users. While other apps might have thought about doing this, it might’ve been really hard to accomplish and execute a few years ago, but in 2024, the timing seems perfect for exploring new conversational mediums.
The next weeks and months will be critical to Airchat's growth and longevity. Early adopters are already sharing the app with their friends and contacts, and podcasters will surely embrace it as a potential extra distribution channel. Let’s see what happens!
