Undeafen

I'm an AI engineer. The social app I'm building this year has zero AI in it.

We have reached a strange moment online. Text was once the easiest, most honest way to say something. Then LLMs happened. Every other LinkedIn post and tweet now comes pre-padded with the same em dashes and emojis no human ever chose. Grammar perfect. Structure clean. You can no longer tell whether a person meant a word of it.

The other extreme is video. Real enough to believe, exhausting to keep making. Lighting, filming, editing, the caption that has to sound clever without sounding like you tried. The bar to say anything at all got so high that most people just stopped.

We built Undeafen for the middle.

You hit record. You say what's on your mind. You post. The voice note lives on your profile the way photos live on Instagram. No lighting, no editing, no caption to agonize over. That is the low-effort part text got right.

But it is also unfakeable. A voice has a human behind it. You hear the pause, the hesitation, the half-second before someone says a thing they meant. You hear the unrehearsed version of a person. That is the trust part text lost.

Easy to make like text. Impossible to fake like being in the room. That is the whole bet.

Some context

My co-founder Shubham and I have been close friends for fifteen years. We bought the undeafen.com domain in the corner of a Dohful cafe in Delhi. He still works full-time as a senior engineer at a large software company and writes Undeafen code at night and on weekends. I am full-time on this.

Everything online right now is racing to add AI. We deliberately didn't. Voice is only worth something when it is yours. The moment a machine speaks for you, there is no reason for anyone to listen. We will use AI later for the unglamorous parts (moderation, transcription, search) but it will never touch what you say. Everyone you hear on Undeafen is a real person, every time.

How to try it

We released the beta on the App Store and Play Store in March 2026. We have kept it invite-only. The people on it use it for everything: poetry, gossip, micro-blogging a thought out loud, casual yapping.

If you want in, here is my girlfriend's invite code: UD-RITIKA. It is limited. Once you are in, you get your own code to bring along the people you want in the conversation.

If you have been quiet on every other platform for a while, this might be the one to say it on.