Search and catch-up for communities that move fast

Search that includes what was said

Search is only useful if it covers where information actually lives. In a voice-first app that includes spoken notes and rooms. Because Yappio transcribes voice notes, a search for a place or a time finds the sentence in a note as readily as it finds a typed line.

Results show where in the conversation each match sits, so you can jump to the surrounding messages instead of reading a lone fragment.

The catch-up view

When you have been away, a catch-up view is planned to summarise the shape of what happened rather than replay it.

• Messages and notes addressed to you, first.
• Threads that grew while you were gone.
• Pinned notes and announcements that changed.
• Events created or updated.

Not a replacement for reading

Catch-up is a way in, not a verdict on what you should skip. Every entry links to the full conversation. The aim is to help you decide where to spend your attention, and to make leaving for a week feel safe.

Working with the For you inbox

The For you inbox shows what needs a reply. Catch-up shows what changed. Together they cover the two questions people have when they return: what do I owe people, and what did I miss.

Searching what was said

Search is only useful if it covers the places where decisions are made. In a voice-first app that includes the spoken parts, so voice note transcripts and, where a room has a live transcript, what was said there are meant to be searchable alongside typed messages. You would type a word and see where it came up, whether someone typed it or said it.

Search results will respect who is allowed to see what. A private channel stays private in results, and nobody should find a note they were never able to open.

How catch-up fits with reading

A catch-up view is a shortcut, not a verdict on what mattered. It is designed to show a short account of what happened while you were away, so you can decide where to look. It works best as a starting point: you read the summary, open the one thread that interests you and ignore the rest.

We expect to get parts of this wrong at first, and we would rather let people turn it off than force it on them. How the summaries are produced, and what is stored to make them, will be explained before the feature exists.

Search that tells you what it did not cover

Search is trusted when it is honest. If a recording has no transcript yet, or a transcript was turned off for a room, the results should say so instead of silently leaving it out. The same goes for access: results from places you cannot see are simply not shown. A search box that quietly misses things is worse than one that tells you where it looked, and that is the standard we are aiming for.

What is still undecided

How far back search reaches, how it treats private conversations and which languages transcripts support are open questions that will be answered before release. We will publish the answers rather than leave them to guesswork.