Naval Ravikant’s Airchat wants to build a social media app around voice notes

Other investors include Sam Altman, the co-founder of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and Jeff Fagnan, the founder of Accomplice, an early-stage venture capital firm.

Ravikant also mentioned that the company has been around in many different incarnations, originally starting with Norgard launching a peer-to-peer voice messenger a few years ago. Ravikant joined about a year ago and got “super involved” in the past couple of months, he said.

How does the app work?

Similar to other social apps, Airchat allows users to follow other users, browse through a feed of posts and then repost, like or bookmark those posts or share it on other apps. The key difference, however, lies in how one makes new posts or replies to others' posts. These are through voice notes, which the app transcribes after one finishes the voice note.

A screenshot of Airchat's homescreen

This relaunch comes as voice messages have become a preferred form of communication over text for many smartphone users across the world, especially in countries such as India.

For people familiar with sending voice notes on WhatsApp, the process of sending posts and replying to them on Airchat should be quite familiar. One can tap and hold the mic button at the center of the homescreen to start speaking. When finished, one can remove the thumb, after which the app transcribes what the user said and automatically posts it on the platform. It currently allows people to send voice notes of up to 60 seconds.

At present, Airchat doesn't allow users to pause the voice note while speaking or preview the voice message before sending. However, one can slide their thumb to the left to trash the note and start over again. One can also add pictures, web links or tag any account in the post. iOS users can also send video notes at the moment.

Airchat doesn't allow people to edit the transcribed note and one has to re-record the voice note to send it again, a move that might frustrate a lot of new users.

In a post on Airchat, Ravikant said this move is a "deliberate choice. We think keyboards are obsolete". He also noted that the transcription models are getting better.

Moneycontrol tried out the Android app for the past few days and in our experience, the voice-to-text transcriptions were quite accurate. It also recognised many Indian languages including Hindi, Kannada, and Marathi. If people mix two languages while speaking, the app automatically translates it to English. However, if they talk in a single language, say Kannada, it displays the post in that specific language's script.

Audio input, text output

While Airchat is audio-only for sending posts, it is text-focused for browsing through other posts, although users have an option to listen to the voice note as well.

"Speaking is the fastest way to generate content. Reading is the fastest way to consume content," Ravikant said in a post.

If the user prefers listening to voice notes, one can listen to the entire home timeline, or any specific conversation by tapping on the play button at the bottom. Unlike X or Threads, where the replies to a post are displayed vertically, Airchat shows replies through a horizontal carousel of users' display pictures. One can tap on anyone to read or listen to their reply.

In Airchat, users can reply to other posts through voice notes

Users can change the audio playback speed to double or triple the original speed and the app also supports background listening. Other features include the ability to send and receive direct messages from people that follow the user and a keyword search section that allows users to search for people and posts on a specific query.

What's also unique about Airchat is that all replies to a post aren't initially visible to everyone scrolling through the feed. By default, only the original poster and the followers of the person replying can see them. However, if the original poster responds to the comment, the entire conversation then becomes visible to their followers. Airchat also allows users to block or mute people.

"We're going to try and put as many of the moderation tools in the hands of the users as possible. We want to be as hands-off as possible... We really don't want to moderate for content but we will moderate for tone" Ravikant said.

He also said that the company has to act if any of the users are "doing spam, impersonation, pornography or just being incredibly rude".

Authenticity, not performance

Ravikant said they want to position Airchat for more "authentic conversations" rather than people broadcasting their posts to a large group of people.

"The currency of this app is replies...This is not about building follower bases and following lots of people and getting followed by lots of people. This is about having genuine one-to-one human conversations. You don't want to be following thousands of people on this app and you don't want thousands of people following you," he said in a series of posts.

Norgard said that they have been talking to some of their early users and most of the people using Airchat today are "very introverted and shy".

Airchat is also building Channels that will enable people to join and participate in communities around a specific interest or a topic. Some of these communities will be large, open channels that anyone can join. Others will be more private, that will require invitations from curators or moderators.

The app is currently rolling out this feature on its iOS app with plans to extend it to Android shortly. Among a few channels that are available on the app at present include Coffee, Fitness, Creators, Bitcoin, and Taylor Swift among others.

"I always analogise (Airchat) to the world's largest dinner party or house party. You can wander from conversation to conversation, group to group, discover and meet people, and make a bid to enter into anyone's conversation" Ravikant said.

This approach may share some similarities with live chat rooms on platforms like Clubhouse and X Spaces, which soared in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic but have subsequently seen a substantial decline in usage.

Norgard however said that live audio or video is a "very taxing experience" for people.

"Not only do you have to show up, but you actually have to perform. And that single thing, having to perform in real time, scares the living daylights of people," he said.

Norgard argued that Airchat's asynchronous approach avoids the anxiety and fear that comes with any new format, since users "can take as many passes at composing a message on here as you like, and nobody knows".

Key drawback

That said, a key drawback that could hamper the app's growth is its audio-only input mechanism. This can limit users' ability to use the app in certain situations, such as noisy places or quiet environments, in their daily lives.

People might also be in situations where they cannot have a conversation, be it in public transportation, or office environments, where text-based platforms can still be used at ease.

In terms of monetising Airchat, Ravikant said there is "no monetisation pressure on the company whatsoever"

"I could care less about monetisation. We will run this thing on a shoestring (budget) if we have to," he said in a post.