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Bolt — Text with one tap
Bolt is for people that have ever felt the urge to drop a quick message when they are on-the-go, hands are full, or just feeling a tad lazy to type.
The biggest barrier to sending text messages with voice is finding "the button" when you're in a rush. This app removes that frustration as the whole chat window is your button to start texting.
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Steve Wu
Just installed and was pleasantly surprised at how well designed and simple this app is. As somebody who tries to use voice as often as I can on my phone, I love the tap and speak from anywhere functionality and including audio is a nice touch that ensures the intended message will always get across.
As with all new messaging apps, the hardest part will be getting my friends to download and use. The bar for messaging apps has risen considerably, which means you need to have significant utility or something cool/unique that makes the app fun to use. For example, Supersonic from Area 120 had a pretty similar service that translated text into emoji-speak that was fun/unique enough to get my friends onboard (unfortunately they killed the app last year).
Curious how the response has been and how you guys think about adoption and growth? Big fan of this app :)
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@stevewu22 Hey Steve, thanks for trying it out!
We're still in our early stages but the app is being well received among those using it! In it's current form, it's mostly useful for folks who send text back and forth a lot throughout the day and don't care too much about the recognition errors. The utility this app provides as-is is sufficient for some to use this as their main messaging app.
That said, I definitely agree that there needs to be a so called "fun" factor to allure more users on board, and we do have some ideas up our sleeves. However, at the same time we want to first focus really on trying to make communication between folks easier and.. well.. better. Personally I feel the "type text, send text, receive text" paradigm is 2 decades too old. With speech recognition improving and everyone practically using their phones as a wearable, we feel there is much more we can do to convey feeling and intent between folks while they are apart.
That said, we would love you to try this app more and give us feedback if possible. It seems like you're also interested in using speech in general so would be great if I could pick your brain on what you've felt (good or bad) using this technology in the past. I'll try to reach out to you separately!
@bolt yeah I can definitely see a use case for significant others or family. If the core focus is making communication between folks easier, I'd recommend checking out both Switchboard (https://www.producthunt.com/post...) and Chord (http://cordproject.co/projects.html), both of which have taken interesting approaches to seamless messaging via voice.
I've tried out dozens of voice/video messaging apps in the past so I'm happy to chat more about it as I'm definitely interested in the space. Feel free to shoot me a message at (https://twitter.com/stevewu22)!
Hello folks!
I'm a father with two busy little ones and I've always wished for an easier, faster way to drop a quick message to my spouse when I'm on-the-go and/or my hands are full trying to pull things around me together. I also happened to work in the area of speech recognition for the past 4 years, and although I've seen the accuracy greatly improve, I felt that the interface around it was still limiting myself from using it when I really need to.
We built this app with the mindset of trying to really simplify the entry point of using speech-to-text, and trying to handle errors easily yet gracefully. We have some new features in mind, but we'd like to first understand which target users would most benefit from the set of features we have as of now. Would it be busy, working parents like us? people who are frequently on-the-go and moving about? people with big hands that find typing difficult?
We're not sure yet, hence looking forward to getting some feedback from the folks here!
Please feel to reach out if you have any questions, and special thanks to Chris for hunting us!