This is so cool, I havent seen anyone that has their act together across so many platforms at launch and when I tested it on Chrome it just worked. So cool.
Honest feedback:
Landing page doesn't provide me with any information. I wouldn't sign up for anything without knowing exactly what it was/does.
'Easiest way to send a message' - that means different things to different people. Easiest way for me is to send Whatsapp or iMessage. Having that as a tagline without any examples or more info doesn't fill me with confidence to be honest.
From what I can make out. This is a way to send audio messages. Currently I can already do that. A friend and I often send them. What is going to make people stop using their current solution and move to Peppermint?
@bentossell Hi Ben thanks for your feedback. Definitely need to add information and I'm planning to add the videos to the home page soon.
The specific ways that it is easier than Whatsapp or iMessage is the following:
Whatsapp is 2 clicks to send an audio and iMessage is 3 clicks, Peppermint is 1 click
More importantly if you are are using Whatsapp you can only send to people who have already installed the app, so you ahve to invite them first then wait for them to sign up if they do and then you can send a message which is not easy. If you are using iMessage you can only send an audio message to other people using Apple (not friends using Android).
Also another way it will be easier is that when you send an audio on Whatsapp it's good for sending but the receiver only has the option to play the message, and personally I find it easier to read, so we're working on automatic transcription, currently only available on the Chrome app not on the mobile apps.
Peppermint allows you to send a message to all your contacts without first inviting them to the app. Also it allows you to reply to emails via audio (on gmail) on a desktop device (which you cannot do on Whatsapp).
@robertrawson ok fair enough.
I guess for me, pretty much all of my friends are on Whatsapp anyway so thats easy, and all I have to do is hold the audio to record and release to send it.
They are not usually long messages either so I'm fine with listening and not needing it in text format.
Seems I'm not the right use-case for this ;)
@bentossell I think convincing someone who already has all of there friends on Whatsapp or Facebook messenger is going to be very difficult, and making it 1 versus 2 or 3 clicks is not enough I agree.
I have two ideas of how to do that:
1. Start with the Chrome/ gmail app to reply to gmail messages with audio. I have seen people take 20 minutes to type an email where they could have quickly sent an audio message in 1-2 minutes.
2. Provide the transcription (currently only in Chrome) which makes it a lot easier to quickly scan/ read the message when receiving it as well as having the audio as a backup.
@robertrawson yeah point 2 makes sense to me.
Point 1 may be an option for some of the time. Of course, some people like taking time to write an email to make sure they say the right thing and can edit etc. Could always pick up the phone but people often prefer to use email (me included). But I can see that this could be useful for some people
Peppermint is demoing at Product Hunt Sydney tonight. Rob has spent the past few months solving the problem of "typing overload". The solution is a multi-platform voice messaging app, with transcription. It makes sending messages fast. You pick up your phone, select a contact, send an audio message. The recipient receives it in both audio and text. You can choose to send the message to a recipient's email or sms. What I like about this app is that there are no invitations involved, it just used your contacts. They can then reply with audio, using Peppermint it they choose to do so. Pretty neat, and I love the name :) The app comes on multiple platforms, iOS, Android, Chrome, Windows, Mac.
It's really interesting, as I get voice messages on the iPhone (from missed calls), iOS transcribes it for me, and it does usually contain a lot of mistakes. But I get the gist of the message, and I don't mind the mistakes. So I wonder if it's the same thing with the idea behind Peppermint, but for email and Sms?
@elbahnasy Hi Iz I think it's pretty similar in that way. It's also a reason why it might be harder for us to get traction on the iPhone.
I think that sending voice via emails with automatic transcription is a huge behavior change but it makes sense. It definitely saves a lot of time for longer emails, unless you can are super-fast typist and type as fast as you can speak!
Ideally we could transcribe the message and get all the words correct and punctuation, but that's going to take a while before it is possible.
i'd like to sign up for this on the landing page but it doesn't think either of my email addresses (firstname@placeofwork.com) are valid email addresses :( I lack validation
@robertrawson I tried it for myself, and yes, there is no annoying "please install the app" popup. Some apps do that -- they make it annoying for the person receiving the message, I suppose to try to annoy them into installing the app themselves. What it really does is annoy me into not using those services. I like Peppermint so far! I just need to use it more.....
I've been using this quite a bit now, and I love it. It's replaced a percentage of my typed SMS messages, and over time, it'll probably replace even more. Thank you!