Say anything: Flow & Music Flow. An interview with Jesse Lu.

Voice-activated song searching laid on a social-emotional, dynamic platform that learns and adapts to your music tastes? There's an app for that.

All-in-one messaging, navigating, table reservation, taxi, anything-you-can-think-of? There's an app for that.

Providing users with an infinite playground and innovating for the future of human-technology interfacing? There's ... an app for that?

On January 4th, Huxiu sat down with Jesse Lu, founder and CEO of Raven Tech to learn more about Music Flow, Raven Tech's music experiment, and Project Flow, their one-app-does-all platform.

Raven Tech was launched in May 2014. Following a one minute elevator pitch on 36Kr's WISE TALK show the company received $3 million from an angel investor. In June 2014 it was selected to be part of Microsoft Accelerator and in July was accepted into Y-Combinator's Winter Batch for 2014 - an honour as well as a testament to Raven Tech's stand-out ideas; fewer than 0.3% of all applicants were admitted.

Music Flow is a free music search and player app for Android and iOS. There's no account registration - a key feature of Mr. Lu's hands-off attitude towards user experience. Just download, install and you're away. Song, album and artist names are all fair game. While users remain anonymous, Raven Tech collects extensive data to learn where and how Music Flow is being used.

For Music Flow 1.1, The total number of users is just short of 400,000 - not bad considering the app isn't actively marketed and spreads through word-of-mouth/text-of-thumb. In these past two months, users cumulatively spent approximately 65,000 hours, or 7.4 years, listening through Music Flow.

"An interesting thing from this voice content," explained Mr. Lu, "is we [found] a lot of logs saying 'wake me up,' 'good morning,' or 'I can't sleep,' ... So it actually tells us that our users don't treat this as a small app but it's something they really want to talk to. It's more emotional, and we didn't expect that."

One frisky user even told Music Flow 'I'm having sex right now!'

MUSIC: A SOCIAL & PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Raven Tech may not have anticipated such intimate applications, but the emotion factor underlies both Mr. Lu's personal attitude towards music and the kind of solutions Music Flow looks to solve. Mr. Lu sees music as fundamentally social, especially in this day and age.

From Music Flow's zero-dollar price tag, letting users search and listen without registering and emphasising voice-interaction with a single touch, Mr. Lu has gone to great lengths to stay out of his app's way. And as a music lover and perfectionist as well as a programmer, Mr. Lu has a bone to pick with traditional modes of listening to digital music.

"You know, [you] go back to your Spotify, where you have a search bar (it's ridiculous!), you type, you auto-correct, you pick out the right version from the list. That's just not the right way to enjoy music ... A lot of people are arguing that pure voice is too risky, but we totally believe this is a more natural way to communicate. Not only for the music scenario but for all devices."

In fact, although applied differently, the same simple, social logic persists in Raven Tech's main product, Project Flow ('Flow' for short). Like Music Flow, Flow is a voice-activated, registration-free app that proposes to solve all of your problems. No, really. All of them.

FLOW: ALL-IN-ONE, SHELF-FREE ARCHITECTURE

As with Music Flow, Flow is single-touch, voice-directed. Mr. Lu described it as a kind of messenger app, but practically there's much more under the hood. Flow integrates messaging with map and navigation services, restaurant reviews and all manners of booking (table, taxi, movie ticket, you name it).

"If you look at this generational platform, no matter if it's iOS, Android or Windows, it's all app-based systems. We have pages of apps on our phones. Just imagine if I'm trying to arrange a dinner with you, we'll probably start from Facebook messenger or any kind of instant app like WeChat - and then you'll go back to home screen and check your calendar and then go to the Yelp app to pick your favourite restaurant and then go to navigation, and then maybe to Uber, and then OpenTable. So, for a simple scenario we probably need 5 or 6 apps. Project Flow is more like instant messenger but it addresses a serious issue. Just imagine. Ms. Rui, (Raven Tech's Marketing Director) could say, 'Jesse, what about dinner near your company tonight?' That can [be sent] as a spoken message. I don't even need to download the app, I don't even need to install any apps. I directly talk to my phone (Mr. Lu demonstrates) "Sounds good, I'll look for Japanese restaurants nearby." Flow opened up a list of Japanese restaurants in the neighbourhood. Mr. Lu then swiped from the top of the screen to the bottom, a gesture that folded the list into a paper airplane, which shuttled off his phone and 'landed' onto the phone of Ms. Rui along with his voice message, 'Just pick any of these.' A cool and smooth exchange, all from a single app.

Mr. Lu acknowledges that there are other similar platforms - such as Apple's Siri - but he thinks Flow can solve a much larger problem. "This [integrating multiple functions] is something Siri is trying to do but it only solved the problem of human-to-machine interaction. Our device is a bridge to communicate with others. It's definitely more elegant, more simple than this [iPhone]."

BUSINESS MODEL

As with the simplicity of the concept, there's a similarly simple way to monetise Flow and Music Flow.

"Flow is a more simple business model. We have this API strategy. The data for all the contents actually came from Yelp or IMDB (Chinese version). They are willing to share this data because Flow will bring them extra traffic and extra orders, and if somebody pays or books from my system, we have a split. From a single scenario, like movies or restaurants, we could generate billions of orders simultaneously, so it's a really healthy platform for Flow."

As for the music side?

"For Music Flow we can actually license software to the existing hardware manufacturers. It's gotten lots of interest by some companies doing speakers."

FUTURE PERFECT?

Flow and Music Flow are still in early stages - Flow itself remains in alpha - but using data aggregated over time and paying attention to problems presently facing smart phone users, Raven Tech is designing solutions for tomorrow. Unfortunately, tomorrow's solutions also hinge on tomorrow's technology. While Flow and Music Flow have immense potential, they are forced to rely on current generations of voice-recognition software.

This is hit or miss.

Music Flow 1.1 interprets Chinese dictation pretty accurately for finding Chinese songs. Not so for English. After the interview back at Huxiu HQ, we gave the app a go. To our amusement, issuing a command for 'Skrillex' yielded unrelated results for 'screw works' and 'The Cinematic Orchestra' corresponded in vain to the non-existent 'This ain't magic orchestra.' Pop fans can rest a little easier - we had greater success with songs by Adele, Taylor Swift or Michael Jackson. Moreover, by shaking your device with Music Flow open, you can access a traditional search bar.

Voice-recognition is likely the biggest problem Raven Tech will face, especially as they head to America this month to attend a conference at Y-Combinator, part of a strategy to bring Music Flow to international markets. The possibilities for Music Flow's playground may be infinite - but shoddy voice-recognition is a critical barrier that can inhibit users' abilities to explore it fully.

Nevertheless, Raven Tech have all the right ideas for streamlining the way smart phone users - whom Mr. Lu refers to sentimentally as 'humans' - interact. And they are executing these with an impressive personal touch.

For more information on Raven Tech: http://raventech.cn/