Ask HN: Building an app to make real-world conversations searchable. Want it?
We’re working on Retrospect (http://goretro.co), an app that sits in the background and intelligently records location and audio from your day-to-day interaction with the world. It lets you access your real-world conversations just like you might search your email. Look for things like “conversations with Sarah at Starbucks” or “Baseball games I’ve gone to with my Dad”, then play back the recorded moment.
We’re launching sign-ups for our free beta starting today if you’d like to try it out.
What do you think? Would you use something like this?
36 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 84.4 ms ] threadThe concept is a goldmine. You need to convince potential users of its security an privacy protection, should there be any. If there isn't any, your product is a ticking time bomb.
I doubt you or your cofounders set out to deceive users or spy on them, but there are many, many government-related reasons to lie to your users about privacy. The government can be very persuasive that way.
Does this not raise privacy concerns similar to Google Glass? Is it not possible that people may be recorded without their knowing and without their permission?
We'll always try to prevent people from being recorded without their knowledge, but in the end it comes down to what our users choose to do. Someone today could cause the same privacy violation by walking around with a tape recorder.
However, while you do address the privacy of the user themselves, what about the privacy of the other unwitting participants who are having their conversations being recorded and stored without their consent?
We'll make sure to notify our users of the relevant privacy laws in their current area, and we'll always encourage people to tell those around them when they have Retrospect turned on.
Frankly, the consumer use cases for this are creepy. If this were a thing, and my friend or family member were recording all our conversations, I would ask them to turn it off or leave.
But I think you should market this to law enforcement, law firms, and possibly business executives. It would be very useful in these spaces to have searchable audio transcripts of court hearings, testimonies, depositions, interrogations, confessions, as well as board meetings, keynote presentations, etc. Maybe also useful for journalists and academic researchers who do a lot of recorded interviews.
If your speech-to-text performance is really good, it could also replace stenography in closed-captioning. (Yeah that's still how closed captioning works for live TV--someone listens and pecks away at a stenotype.)
Basically, sell it any place where a stenographer is currently employed, or where people currently use audio recorders. Don't try to get people to record audio of their entire lives for sentimental value, though, that isn't a realistic use case. Most people's lives are mundane and we know it. We don't need a searchable, chronological index of every time we curse or fart.
I'm so annoyed by this project. Imagine the kind of chilling effect this would have on daily interactions if you knew everything you said was being recorded. It has a chilling effect even if it's you that's recording your own interactions! If I found out someone was surreptitiously recording my casual conversations I'd just never talk to them again, except to chew them out for doing such a shitty thing. Also, if someone asked me whether it's ok to hit record in a social setting, I'd look at them sideways and not only decline, but would instantly stop trusting them and cut them out of my life as a consequence.
I rarely want people to fail, but I really, really want this privacy-busting, surveillance project to fail miserably. We're surveilled enough as it is without intelligent people contributing to these garbage projects.
Ted, Will, and George: work on something that benefits humanity rather than chills the frankness of interpersonal interactions. The potential consequences of this project are awful.
Having said that, I do think there are some potential niche uses for this. In addition to law enforcement and court, it makes me think of the South American tribe that used video recordings of meetings with whites to hold them to their word. They did not read and write English but they found a means to avoid the fate of so many indigent peoples who have been lied to, taken advantage of, and screwed over by people from more "advanced" cultures.
The trouble with audio - as everyone has pointed out - is the privacy and storage issues. What I would be interested in is some way of producing a condensed "markup" of your day, easily searchable using a voice assistant. It would record the basic facts but not the verbatim conversations.
When I first thought of this in any depth it was still unfeasible, but now I think much of it is already there. Still, a big project. Maybe smaller, niche versions for particular tasks would have to come first?