Balancing time when progressing your business can be difficult. You can spend hours reading self-help guides and watching online tutorials to boost your business skills and become inspired, but you could also be putting those hours into your business directly and getting results that way.
Enter Audvisor, a new app that provides 1,000s of audio clips, each less than three minutes long, featuring insight from notable entrepreneurs, authors, and industry experts. The library of short and snappy clips are available for free and allow time-conscious businesspeople to grab some inspiration in the most efficient manner.
In Audvisor, you’ll find clips from 100s of experts in a number of fields. You’ll recognize quite a few names like Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Chi, Heidi Roizen, among others — people that would charge thousands of dollars per head at packed conference halls but are sharing their insight in Audvisor for free.
To me, the idea of short audio insights is truly excellent. The three minute length is short enough to keep your attention throughout and allows you to quickly learn something in situations where time would otherwise be wasted. Listening for a few minutes is also much easier than scouring the web for answers, watching an hour-long TED talk or listening to a full podcast. For the most part, content is punchy and powerful, even in its short form. Occasionally I found some insights to be slightly lacking in depth or a little rhetorical — but perhaps it was simply the style of a few of the experts that did not work for me.
Without creating an Audvisor account, you can simply browse through the library of audio snippets in the carousel-like UI and listen to them individually. Browse by Newest, Top Rated, or Recommended to find content you might like or create a quick playlist by selecting topics or experts you are interested in. Topics include areas like career advancement, effective leadership, becoming a better person, and capitalizing on social media (among other things) and each features more focused clips like Communicating with Clarity, Living a Fulfilling Life, and Using Your Time Effectively. The Experts tab shows you the numerous Audvisor contributors and provides you with a short bio of their work.
For now, Audvisor is very much focused on business-related topics. There are some areas of creativity and work/life balance, but it’s mainly businesspeople talking business. I’d love to see Audvisor gradually broaden its scope.
Creating an account gives you a more personalized experience in that you can 'Like' clips with a virtual thumbs up to save them into your own personal playlist for later listening, but it’s not entirely necessary to have one. I’d like to see more learning features from Audvisor tied to your account — it’s unclear if the Recommended tab is learning from clips I have listened to, skipped or Liked or if these are simply tidbits Audvisor is promoting.
Using Audvisor is fairly simple — you’ll recognize all the visual cues of an audio app like play/pause and skip buttons but its card-like UI does feel a tad superfluous sometimes. There are moments where you get confused as to where you are in the app, with a mixture of stacked cards as well as top and bottom navigation bars. It’s a minor barrier to entry — once you’ve used it for more than a few minutes then you’ll get it completely — but it could be a little jarring at first for some.
Unfortunately, offline support is absent so you’ll need an internet connection to access the app’s contents. Each clip is streamed, so be careful when using the app on-the-go. The ability to download clips for later listening when offline would be a welcome addition.
Audvisor is worth a download because of its original, insightful content from world-renown business experts curated into topics and playlists. There are some minor issues, but being able to quickly draw some inspiration from these businesspeople is hugely valuable and it could turn your wasted downtime into inspirational moments.
Download Audvisor for iPhone from the App Store and for Android from Google Play for free.
