What Happened to Naval's Airchat?

September 27, 2024

6 months ago, Twitter blew up as Naval Ravikant, AngelList co-founder and tech guru, revealed his new voice-based social app: Airchat.

The main idea behind Airchat is that, instead of typing, you record your voice, and AI transcribes it so people can read or listen to your posts as they scroll.

Naval had one strong conviction: "Online text-only media has given us the delusion that people can't get along, but actually, everybody can," he wrote. "It just requires the natural voice." (techcrunch)

The app had the perfect sauce to go viral: a fresh main concept (talking instead of typing), exclusivity with an invite-only access (much like clubhouse), a famous legit founder (halo effect) and many tech celebrities joining like Gary Vee or Garry Tan.

Airchat was funded by Naval Ravikant and Jeff Fagnan (Accomplice Ventures), with Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, also contributing. Despite this backing, the app was free, with no monetisation plan—Naval said they built it "for fun."

While many users called it the best speech-to-text product they'd ever used, others faced some technical issues (access problems and missing features like a stop recording button), and moderation quickly became a major issue, drawing media criticism.

2 months later, Airchat pivoted from a Twitter-like feed to an asynchronous Clubhouse-style model, organising content by topic-based channels.

However, the initial hype lasted only a few weeks, and Naval himself abandoned the platform to return to X.

But what now?

We reinstalled the app to find out.

It still has some active users, creating the vibe of a small, ongoing async conversation—like a vocal wall at an event where you can jump in and add your voice. The last friend joined 19 weeks ago (about a month after launch), and the most recent app store reviews are from 2 months ago.

The team has been silent for months, meanwhile, Kyle Barber, Airchat's main designer, launched a side project, inflight.co, a tool for instant design feedback.

But while searching for updates, we came across this tweet shared by Nivi, AngelList co-founder, earlier this week.

So yeah, it seems Airchat's story isn't quite over yet.