The Initial Idea

Back in 2017 while I was traveling in South East Asia, me and a few friends who were all in different parts of the world wanted to keep in touch. However, the different timezones and various busy schedules made this difficult.

So we started a "podcast", at least that's what we called it. Really what we did was record 10-15 minute long audio recordings and upload them to a shared google drive. It was a whole new way to keep in touch asynchronously and it worked for the most part.

One major thing that kept happening in our "podcast" was one person would talk about something, then when another person responded they would summarize what was talked about and add their comment. There was a lot of repeating of context and you also needed to remember what people said so you can respond to it later.

This is the major problem Roads is setting out to solve. Allow people to comment directly on audio with a new branch of audio. Here's an example; Someone records a 10 minute update of there day, then the next person listens and they have a comment, say at the 3 minute mark, they can now record their comment directly on the original 10 minute audio. When a third person listens and gets to the 3 minute mark they have the option to listen to the comment or "go down the road".

Overall the goal is to let people have deeper conversations and respond to each other within the context of the audio discussion happening.