We are building the Twitter for Smart Speakers

And we want to include YOU in the development process

Hi there. We are Philip and Julian, two product guys from Berlin.

We met a few weeks ago and decided to build a company together.

We want to build the entire thing completely in the open and would love if you would join us on that journey.

Here’s what we have in mind:

The Problem: Smart Speakers are awesome — but they lack good use cases yet

We are pretty excited about Amazon Echo & Google Home and believe voice is the next big platform. And it seems like we aren’t the only ones: More than 50 million devices have been sold to date with that number expected to double in the next 12 months.

Whenever you talk to smart speaker owners though, they only seem to use their devices for an handful of rather basic tasks:

• “Play Kanye West on Spotify”
• “What’s the weather today?”
• “Set an alarm for 8am”

Why is that the case?

😕 Problem 1: Most skills are not that useful
Most of the times it’s just easier and more convenient to open an app on your phone.

😕 Problem 2: Discovery & Retention
Due to the lack of a visual interface, it’s not only difficult to find new skills but also to remember them. So even if you found a useful skill, you might end up not using it.

We believe smart speakers are where the web was in the early 2000s: There were plenty of cool websites (with animated GIFs and guest books), but they were difficult to find and keep track of.

It took a while until Blogs, RSS Feeds, Twitter and Tumblr came along and made it easier to create, discover and consume content.

We want to do the same for smart speaker content.

Meet Airbox: an interactive audio inbox for your smart speaker

Airbox lets you listen and react to a feed of short audio messages from creators, publishers and friends you follow.

Solving the discovery problem

Airbox comes with a (web) app that lets you discover and follow people on the platform.

Solving the retention problem

Instead of having to remember a command for every single creator, you just say “Play my Airbox” — and you’ll get one feed of audio bites from the people you follow. Push instead of pull.

Short, interactive audio messages 📣

Similar to Twitter, creators on Airbox can only send messages of up to 30 seconds, but we are using the interactive nature of smart speakers to let users further engage with the content across different devices and services.

Here are some examples of what this could look like:

Podcast hosts can keep their audience up to date on new episodes.

Lisa uses the Airbox Poll feature to find out which date works best for her friends.

Publishers can use Airbox as a distribution channel.

By connecting Airbox with other services, users can conveniently engage with content.

So what’s next?

We are currently experimenting with some very early stage MVPs but we really want to include YOU into the ideation and development process:

Head over to our website and join our email list to get early access: 👇

Meet AirboxInteractive Inbox for Smart Speakers

Or subscribe to our 😺 Product Hunt Upcoming page:

Airbox - Product Hunt

We’ll reach out to you in the next few weeks with further details.
Until then please let us know what you think:

• What are your initial impressions of our idea?
• What (if any) value do you see in a product like this?
• Any other thoughts?

Leave your comments below or drop us an email at julian@airbox.network

We are looking forward to your feedback! 😊