Crowd Pilot Streams Your Conversations Online, Letting Others Give You Live Advice

Have you ever been in a situation you can’t simply abandon, like a date or work meeting, but could really use the advice of friends or random strangers on the Internet? Well, with a new experimental iOS app called Crowd Pilot, you can get it.

Crowd Pilot, available now on the App Store, works like this. Whenever you need helpful advice in a situation, you can tap into the app and stream your in-progress conversation online (yes, we mean the actual audio), where an anonymous crowd or team of Facebook friends, can tune in and offer text-based advice.

As the pitch video hints, this could prove useful for struggling date-goers stuck in conversational sinking sand, or for an office worker who doesn’t know how to best contribute to a team meeting at work. But since you’re streaming live audio, you probably should be very selective of what situations you choose to make use of Crowd Pilot.

In times where you want to help others, you too can become a crowd pilot. In that same vein, of course, there can be detrimental effects to allowing assistance from random Internet know-it-alls – as not all of them will be out to help you. With those circumstances in mind, it’s probably in your best interest to rally a specific group of Facebook pals who you know will provide genuine assistance.

Thankfully, you can rate groups of pilots based on their helpfulness after the fact – specifically, on a scale of “unhelpful” to “life-saving.”

In our time with Crowd Pilot, we found the frame of the idea to be very sound, offering plenty of categorical options for users who want advice for common scenarios. When we reached out online to get help “wowing a girl” on a date, we never saw anyone connect to give advice.

But this absence can largely be attributed to the app being new on the market. We’ll have to see, after a couple of weeks after the app potentially catches on, to see how effectively helpful the app’s social interaction systems are.

But for the time being, you can give it a shot starting today, for free.