They said
You heard
Every message crosses a gap. Most of it doesn’t make it.
Interpres is a translator between minds. It helps you say what you mean, and it helps you hear what the other person meant. It works in both directions, across whatever divides the two of you.
Why one brain rarely reaches another
Getting a thought from your head into someone else’s is a chain of lossy steps. Each one drops something, and the losses compound.
The words usually arrive fine. It is the meaning that gets lost. The odds of high fidelity are low even between people who love each other, and lower still between people who don’t. Interpres sits in the middle of that chain and carries the meaning across.
- You notice what you meanHalf-formed. Most people stop here and hope the words will sort it out.
- You pick the wordsThe ones that come easily are the ones your own experience handed you.
- The words carry your worldYour culture, your generation, your job, your wiring. None of it travels with them.
- They decode through theirsThe same words land in a different world and mean something else there.
Say what you mean
You tell Interpres what you are trying to get across and who it is for. It hands you the version that person will actually decode the way you intended, in their register, at their level of directness, in the words their world uses.
“I need the exact time.” becomes, for a listener who hears that as rigid: “Could you give me a specific time? Vague windows are hard for me to plan around.”
Hear what they meant
You paste what someone said to you. Interpres tells you what it most likely meant coming from that person, what you probably heard instead, and where the gap is. The outgoing person listening to someone on the spectrum starts hearing a precise mind.
A sixteen-year-old’s “k” is a receipt.
Wherever two worlds meet
The gap has the same shape everywhere. It is wider along certain lines, and those are the lanes Interpres is built for first. The goal in every one of them is the same: understand the other person’s style, in good faith, before you judge the words.
- On the spectrumandnot on it
Precision reads as coldness and directness as rudeness, and the fault is in the decoding. Interpres works both ways: it helps the precise person be heard, and helps the listener notice the intelligence in the message.
- Womenandmen
The same sentence carries different weight depending on who says it and who hears it, and good faith still gets misread: an offer to walk someone to their car is care to one person and a threat to another. Interpres shows each side what the other most likely meant, and where the small frictions are before they become deal-breakers.
- Youngandold
A one-letter reply that one generation sends as a shrug lands on another as a slammed door, and neither is wrong about what the words mean to them.
- One cultureandanother
Whether “we’ll think about it” means maybe or a polite no depends on where you are, and Interpres knows where the other person is.
- Leftandright
Jonathan Haidt showed the two sides run on different moral foundations. Much of what looks like a disagreement about facts is two sides hearing different words.
- Internandsenior exec
Rank changes what a message means. “Quick question when you get a sec” from an intern is a question. From an exec it is a deadline.
At home, and at work
Two places where the gap costs the most, with very different physics.
Home
The hardest conversations happen with the people you live with, because the stakes are high and everyone is tired. Interpres helps partners and families say the true thing without starting a fight, and hear the true thing without taking it as one.
Nagging happens for a reason. Sometimes it is abuse. Sometimes it is the only tool left to someone whose reasonable requests keep getting dropped. Interpres helps both people tell which one is happening.
- Mental load
- Who is tracking the dishes, the appointments, the permission slips, and whether the tracking itself is shared.
- Fair division
- Housework, money, healthcare, chores, and the labor of deciding who does what.
- The kids’ calendar
- Transportation, classes, hobbies, competitions, recitals, and the negotiation of who shows up.
- Promises made and promises kept
- The gap between the two, said out loud without blame.
- Learned helplessness
- The pattern where one person stops trying because the other always takes over.
- Weaponized incompetence
- The new red shirt that ends up in with the whites so laundry stops being your job. This happens, and both people usually know it.
Work
Business is a specific environment with its own physics. Tone, rate, and authority all change what a message does, and they change again at every level, from the intern to the senior exec and back down.
Interpres helps people inside a company reach each other across rank, and helps the company reach the outside world in the register the outside world will actually hear.
- Tone
- How warm, how blunt, how formal, calibrated to the reader rather than the writer.
- Rate
- How much and how often. The message that lands on a peer floods an exec.
- Authority
- Saying a thing so it carries the weight it should, no more and no less.
- Rank
- Interns, colleagues, supervisors, senior executives. Each hears the same words differently.
- Outbound
- Sales, support, partnerships. The company speaking to people who do not share its vocabulary.
Why this, why now
The frame behind Interpres is social physics: the study of how people interact in particular environments, and what predictably goes wrong when they do. A conversation between two partners or two voters is a system with structure. Interpres models that structure and uses the model to bridge the gap.
The political lane is the one that worries us most. When two sides stop being able to decode each other at all, the disagreement stops being about anything and becomes about the other side. If Interpres helps two people who vote differently hear what the other one actually meant, it has done the most important thing it can do.
Reviewed by people who study this
A product about how people read each other needs people who study that for a living. Interpres is being built with advisors who hold credentials in psychology and sociology, and each lane is reviewed by one of them before it ships. Their names appear here once each has agreed to be listed.