Introducing Oddio

A new audio-based social network with a seamless, endless feed

Introducing a new social media platform for short-form audio posts: Oddio. We created Oddio to fulfill some key user needs that we feel are unmet in the current social media ecosystem: The volume of content posted on social media increases all the time, but users have a desire to reduce the portion of their day they spend looking at a screen. At the same time, with the rise of fully wireless earbuds, smart speakers and new formats like podcasts, audio entertainment is becoming a constant background companion for more people. Oddio seeks to harness these trends in a new social media platform.

On Oddio, users upload audio clips of up to 60 seconds. These bite-sized clips are then strung together into a seamless “feed” of audio clips for other users to listen to. Like the visual feeds of applications like Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, the Oddio stream is functionally endless and can incorporate content from the user’s network as well as algorithmically-derived content based on users’ wants and behaviors.

We started with a simple audio-only prototype, a demo version of what one’s feed might sound like. We used feedback on this prototype to better understand the overall viability of the concept, as well as what situations and settings users see themselves using Oddio in. Users highlighted active situations (driving, cooking, working, cleaning, etc.) as key times when they would like to use Oddio. This pointed us in the direction of a hands-free or audio-based interaction system that would let users perform some familiar social media tasks such as “liking,” saving, and responding to posts.

In our next iterations, we tested specific interactions in audio and visual format to understand which features were most desired, which interactions required visual interfaces and feedback, and which could be accomplished via a conversational user interface. Ultimately, we found that users were comfortable accomplishing basic tasks (passive listening, liking, following, feed navigation, and posting) in a pure audio CUI, while a visual interface could be a home for less frequent or more nuanced interactions like editing one’s social graph, adjusting content preferences or creating richer posts.

Our latest iteration positions the user on a central “listen” screen when they open the app — from here, the most common use case would be to hit “play” and exit the app to let Oddio run in the background, conversing with the app via a CUI assistant from there on out. In other cases, users (especially power users) may swipe to the posting screen where they can compose audio clips and tag them with specific categories and tags. Another view lets users adjust their algorithm to feed them clips of a certain type (news, comedy, personal, reviews, etc.) We believe our platform represents a novel concept for audio social media that could have real-world viability with some further refinement.

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