There’s a growing trend of ditching unnecessary meetings in favor of other ways to update your team members. Asynchronous (or “asynchronous”) meetings are productive and waste less time, especially with these free asynchronous video and voice messaging apps for work.
Asynchronous meetings, in a nutshell, are like instant messaging or social media. But instead of a text message, you record a quick voicemail or video (of yourself or your screen) and share it with your team. You can improve productivity by using asynchronous communication in common work tasks such as daily meetings, team check-ins, and project updates.
1. Beseda (Web): Free Asynchronous Video, Screen Sharing, and Voice Messages
Beseda is an asynchronous chat tool that allows teams to communicate via video and screen recordings, voice messages, text messages, or a combination thereof. You’ll need to create an account to get started, but it’s free to use and doesn’t seem to have any restrictions or paid features yet.
Your dashboard displays all the chat rooms you have created or joined in Beseda. A second tab is for unread messages in any of your chats, so you can quickly see updates.
Each chat room has a name and a short description to indicate its purpose. For example, the daily stand-up meeting has four points that attendees will address in their daily update. You can send the room link to anyone to join, and all they need is an account.
When posting a message, you will get a three second buffer before the recording starts. Video messages can be webcam only, screen recording only, or a combination of screen with your webcam in a bubble at the bottom left of the screen. Voice and video messages have a maximum limit of five minutes, while text messages don’t seem to have a limit. When you record voice or video, Beseda will try to transcribe the recording automatically but it doesn’t do it well in our opinion.
2. Yac (Web): Asynchronous Meetings Anyone Can Join, With Voice and Screen Recordings
There are great free video calling apps where you can quickly create a room and send the link to others. Yac is a similar free app to create a personalized meeting or chat room that anyone can join when you share the link. But instead of video calls, you share voice messages and screen recordings.
Once you’ve created a meeting, you can also set a deadline for it, as well as invite people directly through the app. You must register with Yac to create or join a meeting, create your own user profile, and send direct messages to your colleagues. You can also start “channels” for different recurring meetings.
Within your private Yac channel, you can post a message as a voice recording or a screen recording. Participants can then reply to that message, creating a thread that stays on topic. Recipients can read messages at 1x, 1.5x, and 2x speeds, skip 10 seconds forward or backward, and react with an emoji.
Yac also automatically transcribes all voicemails with an AI tool. In our testing, it didn’t perform particularly well, though that could be due to accents.
3. Threadit (Web, Chrome): Longest Asynchronous Video Messages and Clip Assembly
Threadit is one of the coolest new Google apps you should check out. You can use it as a web app on any browser, and there is a Chrome extension that works as a shortcut to quickly launch a new Threadit status update.
There are two good reasons to choose Threadit over other asynchronous video messaging apps. The first is the message time limit. Currently, Threadit lets you record messages for up to 70 minutes, which is easily the longest video recording available for free plans in asynchronous apps.
The second reason is that it lets you record clips and stitch them together automatically. When you start recording via the webcam, you can pause your message at any time to create a “clip”. You can delete clips or re-record them if you messed up, and Threadit will use Google’s video AI software to stitch your clips together into one seamless, cohesive post.
A recorded Threadit message can be shared with anyone, allowing them to view it even if they don’t have an account. You can also download your Threadit videos for use elsewhere.
To download: Threadit for Chrome (Free)
4. Weet (Web): Organized chat rooms for asynchronous working videos
Weet is another asynchronous video app for workplaces focused on organizing chat rooms. With a free account, you can create a “workspace” and invite people to it. You can also configure multiple channels in this workspace. So, for example, you can create a team as a workspace and assign different channels to it for daily meetings, demos, onboarding, and more.
A video in Weet can be up to eight minutes long and feature your webcam, screen sharing, or a combination of both. You can add virtual filters and backgrounds to your webcam recording. You can also pause your recording to create clips, which you can delete or rearrange within the video.
Weet offers robust video editing features, which makes it excellent for demonstrations and presentations. You can trim your video, add chapters and captions, and create GIF thumbnails.
Some features are paid for the premium account. In the free account, you can watch the latest 10 videos in any workspace and save in 720p quality. That’s enough restriction to see if Weet will work for your team, before buying the premium package.
5. PingPong (Web): Slack Alternative for Work Messages and Asynchronous Meetings
Slack is the preferred messaging app for most workplaces, focusing on real-time text chat. If you want the same functionality but in an asynchronous communication style, PingPong is a great free alternative.
The app looks and behaves a lot like Slack, letting you create channels for different topics or workspaces and add people to them. But within each channel, you can’t just send a new message to create a chronological list of messages. Instead, in each channel, you create a new thread and post messages in that thread.
The message can be text, audio or video, where video also allows screen sharing for demos. PingPong will also automatically transcribe your video and voicemails, but won’t do it very well. Other participants can reply to the thread or react to your message.
PingPong also offers “Pings”, which is a personal to-do list. You can add any message to your own pings, keeping a to-do list in the app.
Asynchronous working style helps beat burnout
With such a range of free asynchronous communication apps for teams, you can choose exactly what suits your business needs. And it’s better to do it quickly if you or your employees are tired of Zoom calls and Slack chats.
There is a real fear of burnout in the “always on” work culture that has been built around remote work. One of the main reasons for this is the instant communication favored by messaging and video calling apps. But by choosing to see and respond to messages when you’re in the right frame of mind, you can break those bad work habits and become more productive.
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