The last year saw a monumental shift in our personal and professional lives. While working from home was considered a perk before the pandemic, it has now become the standard for most employees, with as many as 82% of employees stating that remote work is the future of work. The same GitLab report on remote working noted that 34% of employees are concerned about the collaborative experience in such a setting.
Fortunately, Presence emerges as a solution for remote working employees and teams who struggle to connect and find that much-needed team synergy. Presence is a platform designed specifically for remote workers to ensure a smooth and efficient line of communication between professional collaborators. Doing away with the previously utilized time-consuming method of scheduling calls or chatting on text, Presence creates a new way of remote working that increases team rapport while keeping it light and informal.
Presence has designed its platform in a way that retains the advantages of remote working, such as privacy, flexibility, and focused productivity. It does so while ensuring an increased connection between team members so that remote employees can enjoy the best of both worlds. Many of Presence’s competitors focus on either synchronous or asynchronous communication. What sets the company apart is its emphasis on finding the balance between the two models of communication. By doing so, the tool delivers its users the best experience. One of the platform’s features, the ‘silent walkie-talkie’, focuses on the confluence of synchronous and asynchronous communication.
The company wanted to assimilate a live walkie-talkie experience to foster a sense of fun and encourage an informal exchange between teammates. The silent walkie-talkie is essentially a live voice note that eliminates the disruptive aspect of a walkie-talkie. It live-transcribes what the sender is saying, which is auto-muted for the receiver. Once the receiver sees this, they can choose to unmute and listen live or listen to the audio later, as a voice note. The patent-pending feature is a simple way to communicate asynchronously and freely with the team, without ever feeling like one is interrupting them. Moreover, this manner of communication is over six times faster than typing messages or exchanging voice notes.
“Seamless asynchronous and synchronous communication leads to great remote teamwork”- Junu Joseph Yang, Co-founder and CEO of Presence Labs Inc.
In addition to live voice notes, the platform allows teams to have spontaneous virtual office interactions by jumping into a voice room to have a quick chat with teammates or creating one for new employees to join in when they need some support. Teams can access the screen share option to work together on projects, and, if needed, multiple members can share their screens at once. Users can also create log-in free external meeting rooms for meetings with guests, clients, and third-party freelancers. Other features include AI-enabled background noise cancellation, global hotkeys to adjust sound, instant join-ins, music rooms, and the option to link Slack to one’s Presence team.
Presence is a voice-first platform for teams working remotely. Presence is a secure platform using industry-standard and compliant WebRTC protocols. Additionally, they have encryption and decryption for all data exchanged on their platform. Presence currently offers users a free plan for five-member teams and a two-week free trial of their basic plan for teams with over five members.
