[HN Gopher] Show HN: Squawk - Walkie Talkie for Teams
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Show HN: Squawk - Walkie Talkie for Teams
Author : zumachase
Score : 101 points
Date : 2020-06-03 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.squawk.to)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.squawk.to)
| [deleted]
| kawfey wrote:
| This is cool. I can't wait to try it out!
|
| Crazy Feature request: One of the things I've wanted for years
| out of a software based walkie-talkie like this is manual audio
| spacial diversity control (a.k.a. 3D audio). That way I can have
| multiple simultaneous channels, but be able to change the
| position (left/right/forward/45deg/etc) and the volume of each
| feed so I can have situational awareness with all channels while
| being able to use my brain to separate and focus on a particular
| channel.
|
| These kinds of systems are often marketed to dispatch agencies,
| mission control, government/military customers, etc, and are
| super expensive[0]. I've never seen a consumer-grade version of
| 3D audio like this, but that would be super beneficial to ad-hoc
| communicators in disasters, scanner enthusiasts, public event
| coordinators, county/city-level EOCs that can't afford expensive
| systems.
|
| [0]:https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24741/new-3d-audio-
| wil...
| rasz wrote:
| Aureal A3D. Technology was developed in the nineties for NASA.
| Stolen by Creative. Creative simultaneously stole their
| patented tech and sued Aureal for bogus patent infringement.
| Aureal "won" the Lawsuit, but ran out of money due to legal
| fees. Creative bought their assets, IP and funny declaration
| releasing them from any damages from lost patent lawsuit.
|
| Patents long expired, nowadays smallest $2 microcontroller can
| run it in real time.
| macrael wrote:
| Check out https://www.highfidelity.com/
|
| I know it's not really what you are asking for, but it's some
| very cool spatial audio work, letting you separate out where
| folks are in a virtual space.
|
| [disclaimer, I know some of the folks working on it]
| el_nahual wrote:
| I tried out highfidelity a couple weeks ago and didn't get
| any of the directional audio to work. There was a radial but
| not an angular effect if that makes sense.
| jeffpeterson wrote:
| Aha! I'm a huge fan of positional voice audio in video games.
| Mumble has a positional audio feature[0] that is relatively
| straightforward to integrate via mods. I built a mod[1]
| recently that adds support to Raft, and I attempted to list
| some of the benefits in the readme. In my experience, it
| completely changes the feeling of talking with people online;
| they become their avatars. I'd love to see it come to discord
| or zoom, and be lifted out of the video game space.
|
| I haven't looked at Mumble's actual implementation, but I
| imagine it's possible with the web audio APIs.
|
| [0]: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Positional-Audio [1]:
| https://www.raftmodding.com/mods/mumble-link
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I love that Mumble has that, but I wish it were possible/easy
| to enable it without a video game and manually position
| participants.
|
| As for webapps, I think Mozilla Hubs does this:
| https://hubs.mozilla.com/#/
|
| ...as does Freeswitch I believe, though I've had a heck of a
| time trying to get that up and running: https://freeswitch.or
| g/confluence/display/FREESWITCH/mod_con...
| SirYandi wrote:
| I would love for MozIlla hubs (or any similar app for that
| matter) to allow one to set a webcam feed as your avatar's
| "head".
|
| If anyone knows of such a thing please let me know. Would
| be perfect for socialising during quarantine and beyond.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Kosmo.io has a poker app where your webcam feed sits at
| your seat at the table.
| zumachase wrote:
| It's at the other end of the spectrum, but Remotion is
| really cool and does what you describe. We wanted to get
| away from always on video, but I know lots of people like
| that. I cannot say enough good things about what the
| Remotion team are doing.
| jka wrote:
| You might be interested in https://www.calla.chat/ (
| https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla ) which supports
| spatialized audio based on participant location on a top-
| down map.
|
| Edit: in some ways, this might be totally off-base since it
| does involve a game and participant self-arrangement.
| Hopefully it's somewhat relevant, though!
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I could be wrong, but based on the README this looks like
| it just sets speaker volume based on position - which is
| neat, but is not quite positional audio.
| jka wrote:
| I wondered about that too, and found https://github.com/c
| apnmidnight/Calla/commit/abc851b49bd1801... before
| commenting which seemed to indicate that there's at least
| stereo positioning. It's possible I'm mistaken though.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Oh interesting, it looks like you're right! They do
| appear to be using a StereoPannerNode rather than the
| full 3D PannerNode[0], but that is more than just speaker
| attenuation.
|
| [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...
| taxidump wrote:
| I have some multi-tenant PBXs based on Freeswitch however,
| I have not seen a positional audio feature in Freeswitch.
| Can you give more insight? Your link is the conference
| module and unrelated I believe.
| zumachase wrote:
| Thanks! The tech in the link is awesome...might be above our
| pay grade.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| It should be easy to integrate game audio engines, such as
| OpenALSoft.
| plttn wrote:
| It's definitely doable. Dolby Axon (which shut down a few
| years ago) had positional voice chat.
| gflarity wrote:
| Is there a video of it in action?
| zumachase wrote:
| There's not at the moment. I will sort one out in the coming
| days (too late for our HN moment unfortunately). Apparently
| we're not the best marketers.
|
| But it's just like a walkie talkie: press the group you want to
| talk to, and everyone hears you.
| uoaei wrote:
| How is this any different from a local Mumble server?
| nonbirithm wrote:
| How does this compare against Zello?
| gflarity wrote:
| Feedback: Where's the video demo? I don't want to install it to
| see it in action and decide if I want to install it.
| zumachase wrote:
| Much appreciated. That's highest priority for me. Misstep on
| our part.
| hvd9900 wrote:
| looks good!
| pensatoio wrote:
| What happens when you have incoming audio from two different
| groups?
|
| Can you select a particular group to use PTT?
| zumachase wrote:
| This is a tricky problem, and we have a couple of ideas. But
| currently if we're having a longer chat (double clicked will
| latch-open the mic) then we mute the other groups. Anyone else
| in the other groups will be able to see that you're muted.
|
| We're contemplate auto-muting other groups when you have
| incoming audio. Would love to hear your thoughts as well.
| dharmab wrote:
| When I played milsim games like Arma, a useful feature was to
| have my "squad channel" in my left ear, "command channel" in
| my right ear, and separate keys to PTT for each channel.
| grinich wrote:
| Hey @zumachase - was hoping to get in touch but the contact email
| on your homepage is bouncing. (hello@zumaltd.com)
| chaz6 wrote:
| I look forward to an AppImage for Linux.
| zumachase wrote:
| Definitely on the todo list. In the meantime -
| https://app.squawk.to
| awill wrote:
| Isn't Flatpak preferable?
| indentit wrote:
| Reminds me of Pragli [1] but without the animated avatars.
|
| How sustainable is this project? I see it's not open sourced, but
| there is no pricing page either?
|
| Also, how are the connections made, P2P or through a central
| intermediate server?
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22134329
| zumachase wrote:
| Good question: there's no pricing page at the moment because
| we'll always offer the current functionality for free. We have
| some enterprise features (freemium) that we're planning, but we
| also won't charge for those until lockdowns are lifted.
|
| Squawk is webrtc based (audio and data) so it's mostly p2p
| (except for tracking the swarm).
| vhodges wrote:
| Pricing?
|
| Also: similar (from yesterday I think) https://www.walkie.chat/
| zumachase wrote:
| Free
| vhodges wrote:
| Thanks!
| numlocked wrote:
| Cool! Might give this a spin for our live-ops response team.
|
| You should fix your meta description tag on the landing page :) I
| just pasted it into slack and got a...less than useful preview.
| zumachase wrote:
| On it! Thanks
| pritambaral wrote:
| How does it compare against Mumble or TeamSpeak?
| zumachase wrote:
| TeamSpeak and Discord are oriented towards staying in one
| channel for longer periods of time which we found cumbersome.
| Squawk is more conducive to having many groups that you can
| switch between seamlessly: just push-and-hold to talk to a
| different group.
|
| Technically speaking, probably very similar: Squawk is webrtc
| based and fully end-to-end encrypted.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| Mumble is entirely Free Software and self-hostable.
| getcrunk wrote:
| How does this compare to something like teamspeak?
| zumachase wrote:
| This is like being in many teamspeak channels at once. It's
| also built on open standards like webrtc so you could easily
| integrate into a squawk swarm.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Seems more like Discord voice channels. Which I guess is
| analogous to being in multiple Teamspeak servers at once.
| hdjriro wrote:
| Sugestion: volume normalization, compression (as in audio effect,
| not as in zip). A lot of people have shitty mics or change their
| distance.
| miki123211 wrote:
| See also Zello.
|
| It doesn't have the e2e stuff afaik, but works on all major
| platforms, including mobile. They also have a native desktop app
| (not Electron). As far as I know, it's used a lot, mostly by
| drivers for Uber or similar services. I haven't used it for a
| couple of years now, but it's worth giving it a go.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| interesting app for the "corridor conversations" that have been
| lost with everyone Working from Home. It definitely needs
| integration with other communications apps, as its important to
| know when to switch context from another medium to PTT. Seems
| like it becomes a feature for Slack, For Teams.
| zumachase wrote:
| Typically, it's switching from PTT into another context: we
| often start short conversations, and then realize there's more
| work to be done and we slack the results of that to each other.
| mosselman wrote:
| So I'd have this running and then anyone from work can just start
| talking to me and I'd hear it straight away?
|
| That sounds like a nightmare to be honest. How will you ever
| reach any level of concentration this way? Even the thought that
| someone could just start talking to you would probably ruin your
| chances at getting in any sort of flow.
|
| Also, it feels like only a small step away from a form of work
| surveillance. "Where were you? I was talking to you on Squawk".
|
| Unless my assumptions of what this is are completely wrong. There
| isn't much to go on on the page.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Think of it this way, if you are sitting in the office then
| anyone can come talk to you in your cube. I think it can be
| great app if you keep it running during fix hours like 3 hrs in
| the afternoon when anyone can come and ping. Rest of the time
| you dont have to keep it on.
| [deleted]
| zumachase wrote:
| Bingo.
| masukomi wrote:
| think of it this way, most knowledge workers are finally free
| from being constantly interrupted by people who just feel
| like stopping by to chat, or don't really know or care that
| you're focusing on something. Now, there's a tool to bring
| that back!
|
| <sarcasm>It's only like 15 minutes to get back on task after
| every single interruption. That won't hamper productivity at
| all. Much more important for me to get instant answers and
| boredom reduction whenever i feel like it. </sarcasm>
| zumachase wrote:
| I get that. I have plenty of time where I zone out of
| Squawk. But there are definitely projects/periods where I
| need to constantly be checking in with a dozen people and
| various subsets of that dozen.
|
| If that's not a problem you face, then Squawk is definitely
| the wrong tool for you.
| qorrect wrote:
| Yeah don't use it if it's not right for you. I could see
| how this could be extremely useful in the right scenario. (
| I will not be showing this to my boss).
| zumachase wrote:
| Hey - the landing page is definitely in need of love.
|
| Part of this is cultural (you wouldn't constantly shout at your
| colleague in person across the desk) but there are per-group
| and global mute buttons when you need peace and quiet. Everyone
| else can see that you're muted.
| dcsan wrote:
| I wonder if a "dispatcher" model might be interesting for this,
| like an old style minicab/police service. Then people could use
| squawk-scanners for the channels they want to listen into.
|
| It could get annoying if its on all day, SOMA FM provides an
| interesting police scanner with audio mix which is an oddly
| relaxing soundtrack https://somafm.com/scanner/
|
| Are you going to add some jargon, the stuff that made CB radio
| kooky back in the day?
| mattbk1 wrote:
| See also http://websdr.org for ham radio listening.
| tycu wrote:
| Finally, something better than Zoom.
| zumachase wrote:
| We built this specifically because of Zoom fatigue.
| tycu wrote:
| I hate seeing the faces of my coworkers on my screen all day.
| This will make a huge difference.
| sholladay wrote:
| Hooray! I have been holding out hope for more push-to-talk apps
| on desktop platforms. It's such a step up from always-on
| listening. As an audio engineer, I grit my teeth every time there
| is microphone feedback, echo, or other audio issues on group
| calls, and these generally don't occur on PTT apps because
| everyone tends to be muted most of the time. And if it does start
| happening, the user more easily realizes what they did wrong
| because they correlate it with the button press. In fact, even if
| the user does not realize what they did wrong, others on the call
| can identify the source because "it's only happening when Jane
| speaks." I can't tell you how many times I've been on a call with
| feedback where the person who is causing it is complaining about
| it to the group without realizing it's their own fault and others
| on the call don't necessarily know, either. This never happens on
| PTT calls. There's also the obvious privacy benefits, as it
| avoids the issue where people speak without realizing they are
| unmuted. PTT is better in nearly every respect. I'm very excited
| about this.
|
| I do have some questions that the website doesn't answer for me:
|
| 1. What about screen sharing? Seeing the word "collaboration"
| implies to me that I should be able to do so, but it's unclear.
| In the screenshot of the app, I see an icon or two in the right-
| hand sidebar that might be relevant to this, but they seem kind
| of generic.
|
| 2. What about mobile devices? I routinely do Slack calls where
| one or two people are on their phone for various reasons. It
| would be useful to know if that is supported or will be at some
| point.
|
| 3. I want to know more about the encryption. As you're probably
| aware, there has been a lot of controversy over the security of
| Zoom. In particular, there is an ongoing lawsuit related to their
| false claims of end-to-end encryption. [1] I think any new
| product, especially a chat app, that claims to be end-to-end
| encrypted really needs to show us the details of its protocol and
| stack, and ideally open source as many parts of that as possible.
| Does it use the Signal protocol? The site says "Squawk groups are
| invite-only and end-to-end encrypted." But which parts are E2E
| encrypted? The group membership? The message content? The message
| metadata? Everything?
|
| Lastly, it would be great if you could add the app to Homebrew
| Cask, as it's my preferred way to download and manage apps on
| macOS.
|
| 1: https://gizmodo.com/zoom-accused-of-misrepresenting-
| security...
| zumachase wrote:
| Glad to see we're not the only PTT fans out there.
|
| 1. Screen sharing is next on our list, it's the thing that we
| want most ourselves.
|
| 2. This is definitely not mobile optimized. It does work-ish on
| mobile phones, but it maintains long-lived webrtc connections
| so it's not ideal (we ensure these are not transmitting when
| muted, but we have a keep alive protocol which ensures they
| don't die, and would be harsh on mobile batteries).
|
| 3. Squawk uses webrtc, which is e2e encrypted by default.
| Additionally, we don't use any SFUs so we never have the audio
| unencrypted. All link negotiation and audio transmission are
| done entirely p2p and thus completely e2e encrypted.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Is there a plan for (at least self hosted) SFUs for firewall
| transversal? I imagine in some corporate environments that'll
| be necessary.
| zumachase wrote:
| We have TURN servers setup for NAT traversal...but they
| don't terminate ssl like an SFU does.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| That's great to hear. Having battled webrtc in the past
| it sounds like your team is doing a great job!
| upofadown wrote:
| >... end-to-end encrypted...
|
| How do you verify that you are connected to the person you think
| you are connected to?
| zumachase wrote:
| There's a handshake before you accept a connection to anyone.
| Each peer generates a keypair and sends the public key to our
| servers (which they're authed with). On connection, peers
| receive the public key from the Squawk servers, and perform a
| handshake to verify their identity. This all happens p2p.
| ta17711771 wrote:
| What happens on failure?
| zumachase wrote:
| A failure would indicate some sort of malicious actor, so
| the connection is logged and rejected.
| chpwssn wrote:
| Great idea! Switching the model from idling in one channel to
| being in multiple groups at the same time is a good idea.
|
| Do you have plans on releasing a binary for Linux?
| zumachase wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Yeah we definitely will release linux (it's electron based so
| no reason to leave linux out). It works better as an app but
| you can also access it in browser at https://app.squawk.to
| schafele wrote:
| I really like the idea. Push to talk is a proven concept when a
| lot of people work together and should stay informed (e.g. fire
| fighters). I see a huge potential for it...
| simon_000666 wrote:
| Awesome! Great idea - if you are looking for feature requests, it
| would be great if you could also create only bi-directional
| channels on demand. Basically like a Star Trek communicator...
| zumachase wrote:
| Thanks! Definitely looking for feature requests. I'm not sure
| what you mean. Do you mean quick/throwaway groups?
| simon_000666 wrote:
| I just meant more - 1<>1 channels. So I could say : sqwark
| Dave and it instantly creates me a 1<>1 channel with Dave of
| he's available.
|
| Also just noticed the second download link lower down the
| page doesn't work.
| zumachase wrote:
| Ah yeah that's on our todo list. At the moment, we tend to
| create groups like "Person A / Person B" but it's not
| ideal. The plan is that you can also Squawk anyone inside a
| group 1-on-1. Screen-sharing is next on the list.
|
| Download link fixed...thanks!
| simon_000666 wrote:
| Another thought, is maybe you could also make this a
| slack plugin. Would reduce the onboarding friction.
| simon_000666 wrote:
| Cool, yep that also works. Another awesome thing would be
| the option to run a speech to text algo on the
| conversation and have it transcribed into the channel log
| so if I miss the conversation I can catch up on things.
| But also you would need an 'off-the-record' Mode if you
| wanted to complain in private.
| filoleg wrote:
| Not necessarily a feature request, but a request regarding
| the website, possibly a nitpicky request at that.
|
| At the top of the page, under "Push-to-Talk Collaboration",
| it says "Squawk delivers instant team chat".
|
| That line specifically confused me heavily. That line makes
| it sound like this is the feature your product is delivering.
| But MS Teams already has instant team chat functionality.
| What does this mean then?
|
| Aside from this, I love the idea and the implementation of
| your product. Haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I
| definitely have a strong urge to do so now.
|
| EDIT: Looks like I was misled by the title of the HN
| submission. I thought this was a walkie-talkie plug-in for MS
| Teams (mostly because of "Teams" in the title being
| capitalized), not a standalone product (which it, turns out,
| is). Please ignore my original request regarding the website.
| Still excited to give your product a try, probably even more
| now, after finding out it is a standalone product.
| kitd wrote:
| This looks really good.
|
| Is it possible to mark yourself as away? I could see it might
| encourage the expectation to always be present on the receiving
| end.
| zumachase wrote:
| If you mute yourself, everyone else can see you muted. But
| statuses are on one of our upcoming sprints.
| OJFord wrote:
| > mute yourself
|
| The homepage describes it has push-to-talk; is muting
| yourself distinct from not pushing?
| zumachase wrote:
| Yes, muting is on the receiving side: when you mute a group
| (or global mute) you won't hear anyone, and they can all
| see that you've muted and aren't there.
|
| The push-to-talk is on the sending side. So when you're not
| pushing, your mic is muted. And when you click the mute
| button, your speakers are muted.
| OJFord wrote:
| Oh I see, muting a group rather than yourself.
| pachico wrote:
| I love it! Any plans to integrate it with Slack?
| zumachase wrote:
| Definitely in our plans
| pachico wrote:
| Great, I'll stay tuned!
| zumachase wrote:
| Hi all - open beta of a tool we created for ourselves during
| lockdown. We got sick of trying to replicate the effortless comms
| we had in the office, and hated managing a half dozen always-on
| Zoom/Slack/etc calls. So we built Squawk.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Are you planning to open-source this? Will it become a paid
| product? Is it P2P or are you hosting it?
| zumachase wrote:
| We're not planning to open source it. Some features down the
| road will become paid but the free version will always
| contain at the very least what you see today.
|
| The heavy lifting is done P2P falling back to our TURN
| servers if NAT traversal is necessary.
| deepspace wrote:
| When I saw the capitalized Teams in the heading, I was excited
| for a minute, because this would be a great add-on for Microsoft
| Teams. Alas it appears to be 'yet another thing to install and
| run in the background'.
|
| Any plans to provide the functionality as an add-on for other
| communications apps?
| zumachase wrote:
| Hey - we're looking at integrations with other apps, but the
| walled gardens make that difficult unfortunately.
|
| I hear the frustration of downloading another thing - I've
| changed the landing page to make clear you can access in your
| browser at https://app.squawk.to
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(page generated 2020-06-03 23:00 UTC)