😸 Better than an NPR comment section

On a recent episode of NPR's “This American Life,” host Ira Glass told a story about another NPR podcast episode getting a spate of bizarre comments on Spotify. There were lots of abbreviations, emojis no one could parse, and words that didn’t seem to belong together or relate to the episode. A producer thought it was bots.

Turns out it was middle schoolers. And the comments weren’t jibberish—just slang, bruh.

The tweens were likely hanging out on Spotify because they’re too young for social media, and they were using NPR’s comment board as a group chat because it was mostly empty. 

It might have been easier for them to find the right app if they were a few years older. So forgive us for the stretch, but here are a few products that bask in the “teen” label. 

• Teenage Engineering. The Swedish consumer electronics brand has been around for over two decades. Relationship to actual teenagers: Pretty much nothing except for that nostalgic feeling for people born in the 1970s.
• Teen V1. A text-to-speech model that works across 23 languages and is very cheap; it just launched this week. Relationship to actual teenagers: It was built by two of them!
• Teen Index. Speaking of teen builders, this is a global ranking of prominent builders who started out in their teens, from Meta’s Alexandr Wang to SpaceX’s Kairan Quazi. Relationship to actual teenagers: This should inspire young builders.

Unlike a middle schooler, you may want to take an occasional break from Spotify. Here are five audio tools launched this month that might change how you listen to things:

• CodaBridge“is not a whale translator,” but it does use AI models for inspecting whale calls—their timing, the responses—and creating synthetic versions. 
• OVO is a music player that makes your local files feel right at home instead of like “second-class music.”
• SmartPause makes it so your computer knows which tab or app your sound is coming from—and stops or pauses that instead of adding to the confusion.
• The 101 Plays Itself is a live LA traffic camera that plays a note every time a car goes past. What might sound chaotic is actually pretty calm.
• VoxelWall is a suite of live wallpapers that thump and bump in rhythm with the audio your Mac is playing.

by Gabe Perez, head of product curation at Product Hunt

If you think you can build and ship fast, and you haven't launched in the last 3 months, submit your launch by midnight Sep 30. Schedule it here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/new

Be prepared to build and ship multiple features in real-time. Appropriately, given the speed theme, we've partnered with TypeSafe AI, makers of Jev, a frontier model at real-time speed, and Supabase.

Prizes will include Jev credits, swag, and secret prizes we'll announce later.

And if you're not launching: Mark your calendars to try out new products, give feedback, and watch the top builders evolve their product over the course of the day.

Each participant will need real, actionable feedback and feature requests, and only featured posts will be eligible to participate.

by Johannes, co-CEO of Swat.io

This started as an embarrassing internal failure. 

At Swat.io, we run a social media management tool for 1,700+ brands, so we thought getting our own people posting on LinkedIn would be easy and obvious. Seven signed up. Two to three were still posting a month later. The rest? Did not know what to write about, did not stay motivated enough over time. Our very own social media manager tried to keep momentum, but she did not have time for 1:1 sparring with everyone.

On the other hand, Claude and other tools came up and suddenly there was AI-written long-form content everywhere. It just did not sound human anymore after AI took over on its own to prepare full content schedules. We lost even more people who were excited in the first place.

As software-as-a-service builders, we sat together and discussed how we can improve the situation for us internally and for our customers. And after watching the first Ted Lasso episode of the current season, it was obvious what was missing: a coach that helps you become better on your own.