Posting Voice Notes publicly on X may no longer be possible, but you can now share audio messages within X’s direct messaging system, X Chat, once again. The social network announced late on Wednesday that support for Voice Notes is now available within its private messaging service.

The feature, which works in both one-on-one messages and group chats, is activated with a push of the voice input icon to the right of the chat’s text box. At launch, you have to continue to press the button to record the voice message, but we found that a press-and-hold gesture followed by a swipe up allows it to record without having to keep your finger on the button.

The new addition could make X Chat more competitive with other messaging apps, where recording audio voice notes has long been a standard option. This is particularly important to the company, given the recent spinout of X Chat as its own stand-alone app.

It could also assuage angry users who didn’t appreciate that the upgrade to X Chat removed the Voice Notes feature.

The move follows X’s recent beta tests of an X Chat app on iOS, which offers access to X’s upgraded DM feature. While the company claims that chats are end-to-end encrypted, security experts have warned that the service is less secure than other encrypted messaging apps, like Signal.

Apps like Superhuman and Mimestream have tried to get people to inbox zero on the desktop. Now a new app called Avec for mobile devices, initially available on iOS, aims to get you through your inbox using Tinder-style swipe cards and voice-based replies.

By default, the left swipe adds the email to a pile that you can address later, and the right swipe adds it to the done (or archive) pile.

The email “stack” of cards also has a button at the bottom that lets you hold it to reply to emails using your voice. When you release the button after speaking, the transcription will show up as a draft. You can review the transcription for errors, make any necessary edits, and then send the email.

Avec said that while apps like Wispr Flow, Willow, and Monologue exist, they are constrained by Apple’s APIs, and users need to install them as a separate keyboard app to work. Meanwhile, Avec has the full context of your email, so it can understand names and apply better edits based on the tone of the email. Because of this context, the email app can understand your personal email style as well, the company said.

While managing your inbox, Avec lets you mark unimportant emails by swiping down. The email will learn from what’s put in the unimportant pile and can show it to you in a group instead of forcing you to triage these emails one by one.

While the card-based interface is Avec’s unique feature, it also offers a plain old list-based view.

The app was founded by Jonathan Unikowski, who previously worked at Replit in a product engineering role. Unikowski said he was thinking about building tools that he would use every day. He explored ideas like building a browser but eventually ended up with email.

“It’s this thing that hasn’t changed for 25 years,” Unikowski told TechCrunch over a call. He said Gmail was the last big change in email, which has had long-term impacts on how email is managed. “It’s a big part of everyone’s life, no matter how much they hate it. And it seemed very clear to me that through a combination of really good design and, of course, the judicious use of these new AI tools, we could do much better.”

Avec is not alone in having this thought process. Apart from Superhuman, apps like Shortwave and Spike have tried different approaches to presenting email. In the last decade, Basecamp’s Hey has tried to “reinvent” email by becoming a new provider, but, as a paid service, it hasn’t reached the same scale as Gmail.

When I asked Unikowski about choosing mobile over desktop as a first place to launch an email client, he said that constraints on the platform can force creativity, and the phone is usually the place where people look at their emails.

“I really am a firm believer in this idea that constraints force creativity, and so you get away with a lot less on an iOS app. On phones, you have a very small screen [as compared to the desktop]. You don’t have a physical keyboard. So if you’re going to convince someone to install a new app, it needs to be really good. And for it to be really good, you need to be extremely inventive,” he said.

The app is currently available in the U.S. and is free to use for Gmail users. Support for Outlook is in the works. Unikowski said that the company plans to introduce paid tiers at some point, but it is still ideating about what features to include within that premium offering.

The company has raised $8.4 million in funding to date from investors, including Lightspeed and Haystack, with participation from individuals such as Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Replit’s head of AI Michele Catasta, Behance co-founder Scott Belsky, and Lenny Rachitsky.

Bret Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Sierra, a startup that builds customer service AI agents for enterprises, is convinced that the way humans interact with software will change in the near future.

Last month, Sierra launched Ghostwriter, an agent designed to build other agents. With this “agent as a service” tool, the startup intends to replace traditional click-based web applications with natural language. Users simply describe what they need, prompting Ghostwriter to autonomously create and deploy a specialized agent to execute the task.

The idea of replacing software with language-driven prompts is intriguing in large part because many of the tools currently used in enterprises are not used regularly, contends Taylor, who was formerly co-CEO of Salesforce.

“You sign into Workday when you onboard as a new employee, and maybe for open enrollment,” Taylor told the audience at the HumanX conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Instead of learning to navigate complex systems, he argued that users will soon use natural language to complete tasks without ever interacting with the software interface.

“I truly think that’s where the world is going,” Taylor said.

He added that Sierra is already leveraging Ghostwriter to deploy agents at “unparalleled speeds.” Taylor offered, as an example, that his startup implemented an agent for Nordstrom in just four weeks.

Sierra announced last fall that it reached $100 million in annual revenue run rate (ARR), less than 21 months after its founding. The company was last valued at $10 billion when it raised a $350 million round led by Greenoaks Capital in September.

“Most companies don’t want to make software,” Taylor said. “They want solutions to their problems.”

While a fundamental shift in software may be coming as Taylor predicts, several technologists and investors tell TechCrunch that, for now, AI agent implementation is far from autonomous.

Many companies claiming to offer AI agents, including Sierra and legal AI startup Harvey, employ “forward-deployed” engineers who must constantly update and fine-tune customer agents to ensure they work as intended.