Shower thought: TikTok and Twitter like app but for Voice

Apps
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This post is literally a shower thought at this stage. Nothing more, nothing less.

As some of you know I run cryptofireside.com which is a blog I host under the Medium CMS frame. I speak to a lot of people from all over the world regularly and while it appears as though there are 31 interviews there. I have 4-5 more in the work and dozens more that for whatever reason the interview never worked out, things changed, projects changed, people went walkabout whatever.

The point is, I chat, email, call and zoom with lots of folks regularly. I call these fireside chats.

I frequently use the voice message option in my chat apps and it works great. I can put an idea or comms into a minute-long audio which would take me much longer to formulate in text. Especially if it is a new person I am introducing myself to and they don’t yet know me and have to type everything up.

Now take this concept. And think about Broadcasting.

YouTube does video, and TikTok does mini videos.
WordPress does articles and Twitter does mini articles.
Spotify does podcasts but nobody does mini podcasts…not that I have found anyway.

Why isn’t there a mini version?

From my POV I don’t like video as a content producer, it is not my cup of tea because it takes some hardware and software and well you have to wear pants if I am being honest. But then there is TikTok which you can just do on your phone, hit record, boom, you are done. If you want, you add some text and audio from with the app and boom done again. Broadcast all over the web in minutes.

I used to host a podcast too and part of the issue which is why I stopped, I’m strapped for time, I did not like that I needed a mic, headphones, recording software, then I needed to upload, RSS, tweet it out. It all took so long.

If there was a mini podcasting app to broadcast mini voice messages it could be used to communicate ideas, discuss, debate, shower thoughts, ideas, even entertain, jokes, music, songs. The sky is the limit.

What do you all think?

If anyone wants to work on this idea with me, hit me up.
I am not a developer as everyone here knows but Im not stupid either.
I have some money being released this year and have some funds I could place into an idea like this but we’d need a team too put together. This does not have to be related to SAFE or it can be.
I’ll finish off the same way that I started. This is just a showerthought at the time of writing, nothing more, nothing less. But if you are reading and interested in it being potentially more than shower thought, reach out, you never know.

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Not my area but you may have something.

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I dont use tiktok other than politely watching what family send me sometimes so that I can react accordingly.

What I have noticed is that what appears to be the most popular is not necessarily what is said but the the “visual reaction” of the person/people in the clips.

It is all very much put on and exaggerated but the audience gobbles it up.
It would be much harder without the video in my opinion.

Will be niche, I think.

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I totally get the “spontaneity” of this and it would be a shame to not make the best use of that but I see the main problem with this for “serious” use ie- other than pics of kittens and unbearably cute kids is the inability to (easily) search for spoken key words and phrases.

But I am not up to speed on this at all - perhaps I am wrong. Please correct me. But I fear a lot of valuable conversations may be lost to the rest of us because we cannot easily search the transcripts. If speech-to-text can now handle @goindeep @stout77 and @neo speaking Oztroylyan and @scottefc86 Liddypule accent then thats cool. I myself would present some problems if I dont make an effort to speak “standard” English. And thats before we move onto those contributions from @Dimitar @tfa @folaht and many others whose written English we understand perfectly but their spoken English may trouble a STT engine. Then there is @Sascha who although Finnish and multi-lingual to the max, still sounds like a redneck from Georgia…

I fear we may lose a lot of valuable ideas /discussions. Please tell me my fears are unjustified.

Recently been watching some Youtube tutorials by folks from India and although they are speaking “correct” English , I found the accents almost impenetrable in more than a few cases. Some had provided sub-titles , others left it to the auto-translate and results were patchy at best. Also a couple of videos by French pilots and how to deal with your propeller falling off at 3000ft. They lived to narrate the tale but the auto-translate did not handle colloquial French to written English very well…

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I’m considering taking speaking lessons…
Sometimes I get this urge to be took serious outside of Hodge, Louisiana (Population 382) when I open my mouth…
:pensive:

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Probably good idea to let publisher to edit speech-to-text1 when they publish it. I don’t know what the interest would be. You’d probably have to help it out with some ideas:

  • Parady songs
  • Jokes
  • Poetic or narrative shorts

I guess this would be TikToc for those who don’t want to worry about their appearance. People can have fun with sound effects, too.

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Somehow I stumbled over many detours into the forum (hello!) and read your showertought and thought to myself, the idea is actually really good!
Some of the answers of previous authors here have valid concerns.
I think you would do a similar thing what TikTok has done with Instagram / (YouTube) – basically nothing else than increased the „frequency“ of content.
Maybe your idea would do the same with podcast providers or the podcasts itself!

I think we would have to continue to ask questions, look for answers and ignore the why there is not yet something like this!

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very interesting! would be a great app to listen to when you wanna hear lots of different opinions about a topic!!! quora style but short answers!

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maybe soundcloud is what you are looking for but it has no limit in length!

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I have a great talk with a fellow matrix user and we even found a name Speakion from speak and opinion
as we talk about a service like twitter(mastodon) that is about short opinion that you can hear in succession for a subject. come join us if you want! https://matrix.to/#/#atmachine-alternativetech:matrix.org

names keep coming up tangopinio (in latin tango and opinio that means speak and opinion) feelion (feel and opinion)

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Thanks all.
I spoke to a fellow dev friend of mine in the space and this was his response:

Hey Andrei so we’re at a tricky point in technology where paths are diverging. The traditional way of implementing your idea is the google model. You spin up some servers, create a simple website plus native apps, user accounts, all the code for following/friending, integration with other social media platforms, etc., etc. You could try to charge people but normies love their free stuff, so the google model of showing ads based on post content is still dominant. This means you’d need to automatically turn the audio into text on your server and do “semantic analysis” on it so your service knows what a given user is interested in. This gets pretty complicated, and you really need the Silicon Valley BigTech crap to pull it off. If some VP at FaceGoog suddenly had the same idea has you, this is how it would get implemented.

The next step away from that is using all the same centralized server stuff, but don’t analyze the audio. This would drastically simplify implementation and reduce costs. However you’d have to rely a bit more on shot in the dark type of ads and donations, and perhaps “pro” subscriptions that do things like block ads, or allow higher audio quality. Bitchute would be closest to this. It has an advantage that it’s geared towards conspiracy-minded folks. It already has a built-in niche interest. Gab.com is another platform that seems to have figured this model out. Again though, conspiracy theorists! Let me know if you can think of other services, especially more mainstream ones.

The NEXT step away is going all blockchain. Your audio would probably be saved in OGG format, just like Telegram. Your 5-minute audio clip you sent me is 1.4 megs so you’re looking at 280Kb per minute. This means space-wise it’s similar to storing pictures. In other words, not a big deal in the old traditional centralized server model, but pushing the limits for direct storage on a blockchain. So you’d need second layer integration like LBRY does it. LBRY is like bittorrent but the seeders can charge for file chunks. Look into https://getsession.org too which is an OXEN-based Telegram/Signal competitor. A public group admin broadcasting text messages is not too far away from a user broadcasting audio clips to their followers.

LBRY has had trouble reaching critical mass so they created Odysee, which is a big centralized service like Bitchute but ultimately uses the LBRY blockchain for channel and user metadata. So they can at least claim to have a blockchain-based model, but in reality it’s still mostly centralized server stuff like Bitchute. In other words, it’s a good example of the challenges you’ll face still if you try to go all Web 3.0 right out of the gate. They had awesome ideas/ideals for LBRY but ultimately had to backstep to more traditional models. I think they’re even getting into ads now.

If money wasn’t an issue, like if you were a billionaire that just wanted to finance it and didn’t care about a business model, we could get you rolling with a solid proof of concept in a month or two, native apps and all, based on the centralized server model.

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great! in the meantime I am setting up a discourse forum with the domain redacted (the forum is installed I just need to setup correctly smtp, its currently blocked by linode) and lets continue the brainstorming there. I am all for foss and activity pub it would be as simple as modifying the mastodon code! for income I thought of a service that plays some music in between the “voices” “opinions” audio. like a radio broadcast

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Here’s right… but Safe Network!

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How do I hire your friend ?

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You pay me a consultants fee, ill take everything you want, tell him and pretend to be doing some work.
Lol, JK. Feel free to DM me.

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hello people interested in this

I made a discourse forum where we can discuss about this idea!!!

join now tangopinio.org

p.s.
why tangopinio?

its from latin tango and opinio which roughly means speak and opinion!

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I have been reading this and like the idea, but I still wonder how different code/App wise it will be from a video site and just searching on audio uploads.

Code wise this could just be a function of a video/voice/text App like TikTok, twitter/Youtube. The App stores your content as part of your files (you have complete ownership etc) and searches all the other channels for the type you are using (text, audio only, video)

The only thing I see is that text often has a more forum style of threads etc, whereas audio and video is more playlists and channels.

What am I missing here?

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Awesome love it!

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Great idea!:+1::sunglasses::+1:

Much like the twitter character limit, I think you would need to limit the audio length. Maybe something like 2x the time it takes to read the longest tweet. (30 seconds?).

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This is what bothers me about this idea.
However IF we can put some good minds together over on @Dreamerchris Discourse channel then who knows what we can do to address this issue?