Naval Ravikant’s Airchat is a social app built around conversation, not text

Aerial Chat is a new social media app that encourages users to “just talk.”

An earlier version of Airchat was released last year, but the team — led by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder product executive Brian Norgard — rebuilt the app and relaunched it yesterday on iOS and Android. Currently invite-only, Airchat is already ranked 27th in social networking on Apple’s App Store.

Visually, Airchat should look quite familiar and intuitive, with the ability to follow other users, scroll through a feed of posts, and then reply, like, and share those posts. The difference is that posts and replies are audio recordings, which the app then transcribes.

When you open Airchat, messages start playing automatically and you quickly scroll through them by swiping up and down. If you wish, you can pause the audio and just read the text; Users can also share photos and videos. But audio seems to be everyone’s focus and what Ravikant describes as a transformation in dynamics compared to text-based social apps.

After joining Airchat this morning, most of the posts I saw were about the app itself, with Ravikant and Norgard answering questions and soliciting feedback.

“All humans are meant to get along with other humans, it just requires a natural voice,” said Ravikant. “Text-only online media has given us the illusion that people can’t get along, but in fact everyone can get along.”

This isn’t the first time that technology startups have bet on voice as the next big thing in social media. But Airchat’s asynchronous, threaded posts provide a very different experience from the live chat rooms that briefly flourished on Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Norgard argued that this approach eliminates the stage fright barrier to participating because “you can make as many attempts as you want to compose a message here, and no one knows.”

In fact, he said that in conversations with early adopters, the team found that “most people using AirChat today are very introverted and shy.”

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Personally, I still haven’t convinced myself to post anything. I was more interested in seeing how other people were using the app — plus, I have a love-hate relationship with the sound of my voice.

Still, there’s something to be said for listening to Ravikant and Norgard explain their vision rather than just reading the transcripts, which can miss nuances of enthusiasm, intonation, etc. And I’m especially curious to see how the deadpan jokes and shitty posts translate (or don’t) to audio.

I also struggle a bit with speed. The app defaults to 2x audio playback, which I found unnatural, especially if the idea is to promote human connection. You can reset the speed by holding down the pause button, but at 1x, I noticed it would start to skim when listening to longer posts, so it would typically skip before hearing the full audio. But maybe that’s okay.

Meanwhile, Ravikant’s belief in the power of voice to reduce acrimony doesn’t necessarily eliminate the need for content moderation capabilities. He said the feed is powered by “some complex rules about hiding spam, trolls, and people you or they might not want to hear from,” but as of publication he had not responded to a follow-up user question about content moderation. .

Asked about monetization – that is, when we might start seeing ads, audio or otherwise – Ravikant said that “there is no monetization pressure on the company”. (He described himself as “not the only investor” but “a big investor” in the company.)

“I couldn’t care less about monetization,” he said. “We’ll do it on a shoestring if we have to.”