'Audio at work' platforms your company is missing out on

There’s no question that audio is having a moment and that social audio is getting all the attention. Clubhouse set off a major domino effect and caused every social platform to play catch-up and launch new audio products. But what about audio that makes our lives easier and our brains smarter at work?

At elocance, we’re more interested in the rise of functional audio and how this impacts our work life. We’ve gathered a list of current and new players that are making our lives easier and our time more productive.

Here is the new club of audio at work platforms everyone should be talking about:

1. Vennly

We’ve all worked in organizations where we feel far from senior leadership. We may have never heard their voice or spoken with them directly (shout out to my 20’s). So knowing what they’re thinking or where they’re taking the organization is a blackbox that the awkward run-in at the coffee machine probably won’t remedy.

That’s where Vennly comes in. Vennly is a platform that lets you create, collaborate and share audio content with your organization easily. No recording studio? No problem. Their online platform allows users to record studio-quality content or upload existing content. Vennly’s workflow makes it easy to collaborate with other content creators in the organization and share status updates, approve content and track engagement performance. Vennly also integrates with platforms like Slack, MS teams or company intranets making it easy to post content across various channels.

Audio content from senior leaders is a great way to drive engagement and share information to keep everyone in the organization informed. Plus it’s a lot more personal than those quarterly CEO memos. Just sayin.

2. Yac

Remember when we used to yell across our cubicles to quickly get an answer to a question we had? It was so much faster than writing an email or pinging someone on Slack. The answers yelled back were usually short and sweet which is more than I can say for many of our colleagues’ long, arduous email responses. Am I right?

Enter Yac. It’s adding that “yelling across cubicles” efficiency to our remote-working lives.

Yac is an audio-first messaging platform that helps you eliminate pointless meetings with voice messages, searchable transcription, and async screensharing. Imagine WhatsApp voice messages get it’s own dedicated platform for business. That’s Yac.

The company started as an entrant to Product Hunt’s 2018 Maker’s festival with a platform that made it easier to communicate while working remotely. Talk about ahead of their time! They won Product Hunt’s coveted Golden Kitty and promoted their product on Twitter, garnering attention and funding from VCs like Boost, Betaworks and Earnest Capital.

Today, YAC is working with teams all over the world and bringing them together using asynchronous voice while making working more and making work more efficient. Our team loves this platform that works alongside email and Slack but streamlines meetings etc. and we think yours will too!

3. Otter

Imagine a world where you no longer have to take notes or send out meeting recaps. A world where all your content is magically transcribed and sent to your colleagues. Now put your pen down and check out Otter.Ai.

You might disagree that Otter.ai is an audio product but we think audio is at the center of their offering. Otter.Ai is a live transcription app that turns human voice into transcribed text. Long boring meetings can now be recorded, transcribed and quickly edited into notes. Their platform allows for real-time transcription so people can receive text files of meetings that are taking place in the moment. Everything that otter transcribes is fully searchable by not only text, but audio, video and even images.

Their group sharing feature is also great for collaborative teams to quickly share information. Imagine if you had a real transcript of a meeting you missed and were running late for? Otter keeps everyone informed and on the same page with collaborative note-taking. Otter already counts companies like IBM, Dropbox and Zoom as clients and is a favorite amongst top universities like Columbia as well. What are you waiting for?

4. Spoke App

Spoke is basically the video version of Otter but a little different. In our video-heavy post-pandemic world, we are constantly screentiming. Spoke allows users to create mash-ups of those video calls and share with others as a recap. In a matter of seconds, colleagues can receive a quick video mashup of what happened and / or a transcript of the video call. It makes meeting minutes watchable because who actually likes to read nowadays anyway?

Spoke is especially great for user interviews and employee recruitment so think about bringing audio into your candidate search and insight mining process!

5. elocance

If you’re here, you probably know us by now. elocance is a productivity app that converts articles, PDFs, documents and emails into audio podcasts, so you can listen and multitask on the go. We all know that person (or are that person) that has a million browser windows open with that article they’re going to “read later.” Instead of leaving them there all disorganized, you can save them to your elocance app using our Chrome extension and then listen to them while doing something else. For example, you can listen to articles while exercising or going on a run. elocance isn’t just for articles and, actually, most of our users prefer listening to lengthy PDF documents. They can get their eyes off their screens and listen while driving in the car or picking up around the house. If you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re a little obsessed with multitasking.

elocance gives users 20 free minutes of listening per week so you can test out the app and see how you like it. It’s available in the Google Playstore and App Store. You’ll also find popular newsletters in the app in audio (The Hustle, Morning Brew etc.)

We’re really excited to be joining this club of audio tools for work. We’ve been growing our presence and speaking with thousands of users all over the world. What’s become clear is that our users see elocance as a way to get ahead at work and save time. While we turn content like PDFs, articles and documents to audio, we do so much more than that. Our collaborative playlists allow you to save your content in one place and then share it with your peers. Organize content by topic, length or importance. Mix articles and documents in the same playlist and listen to them (instead of reading them) to save everyone on your team time and energy. We’re working on lots of ways to make the app and our features better and more collaborative because we truly believe that we have a lot to learn from each other.