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80 points pz | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.213s | source

Hi HN, I’m Phil, one of the co-founders building emdash. Previously, I was an early engineer at Facebook and led Customer Products at Square.

We’ve focused on making chat and video work together so distributed teams can stay aligned without drowning in information. You can try it here: https://emdash.io.

It frustrated us how easily important conversations would happen and then disappear. Slack never quite matched how we worked. Channels were too coarse which led to noisy notifications and broken search. Zoom meetings weren’t much better–unless someone took perfect notes (which rarely happened), video calls became black holes of lost knowledge.

We spent too much time trying to find the information we needed to do our jobs.

To address this, we’re testing a few concepts and would appreciate your feedback on the value of the following:

(1) Automatically record, summarize, and transcribe your team’s video chats. We store meeting content directly inside discussions to facilitate search and discovery.

(2) Make it easy to manage & organize conversations of varying scope. A chat between team members can be forked into a dedicated Discussion with its own audience permissions and subscription. Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact. Conversations can evolve unpredictably, so having the right tools to keep them organized post-hoc was important to us.

(3) Improve search with AI and hierarchical information retrieval. We use LLMs to uncover insights, summarize content, and connect the dots across related discussions, meetings, and documents. You can ask questions like “What are the team’s priorities this week?” or “What did we decide to do with feature X?” and get back a generative response AND deep links into the original chats and meetings.

Try it out: https://emdash.io and tell us what you think!

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cryptonector ◴[] No.43192021[source]
"Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact" -- sounds like a start, but I want more.

Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs.

Email integration would be nice. Emails -> IM, so I can read IMs and emails in one app. IM -> email (right-click on a range of messages, click send, get placed in $MUA and edit).

Don't forget retention controls, support for on-prem, etc.

replies(2): >>43192077 #>>43195533 #
1. pz ◴[] No.43192077[source]
> Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs.

Tagging is another organizational feature that is on our roadmap and has always made sense to me. Right now our organizational model is primarily hierarchical which has obvious limitations.

RE: email integration - We have a pretty robust email integration right now. Neville was always insistent that we shouldn't force people into the app to have a conversation, especially for one-off collaborators who get looped into a chat. They can stay blissfully ignorant of the fact that the conversation is actually happening on emdash if it suits them.