vocial

A voice is breath turned into a bridge. It carries things that words on a screen sometimes lose. The weight of laughter, the hesitation before saying something difficult, the tiny crack in a voice that tells you more than the words themselves.

And I think that is what caught me. About ten years ago I stumbled across an app called Anchor. Completely by accident. Back then it was very different from what it eventually became. You could have these spontaneous audio conversations with people all over the world. And at that point in my life I was mostly bound to my bed.

My physical world had become very small and then suddenly voices from all over the globe started arriving in my living room. Different countries, different lives, different ways of seeing the world. And without physically going anywhere, my world became enormous.

My perspective genuinely changed. For me, that little app was life-changing. But Anchor kept evolving. It became first more like a radio platform, then something closer to Snapchat for voice. And eventually Spotify bought it and over time it became what we now know as Spotify for Creators.

But that first experience stayed with me. That feeling of discovering another human being through nothing but their voice. So I kept searching. And when I say searching, I mean I tried pretty much every social audio app I could find.

I became part of different communities, watched platforms appear, change, disappear. And somehow I kept waiting for social audio to truly break through, to become mainstream. And strangely, it still hasn't.

I don't really know why, especially now, because we are entering this era where more and more of our world is generated, automated, filtered and mediated. And I actually thought that would make people crave voice even more, human presence, the

imperfect little things, the laugh you didn't plan, the pause while you search for a word, the emotion you can hear before someone even explains what they feel. Text can tell me what you said. Voice lets me feel a little of where it came from.

And that has always fascinated me. Which brings me here, to VoiceShall. Ten years after stumbling into Anchor, I'm still following this strange little thread, still curious about what happens when people stop typing for a moment and simply speak.

I have hopes for this place. Not because I know exactly what VoiceShall will become, I don't. And maybe that's the interesting part. So, if you are hearing my voice for the first time, hi, I'm Unity from the Netherlands.

Apparently, I've spent the last 10 years following voices around the internet and I'm still listening, to see where they lead.