Facebook to Launch its Own Version of Popular Social Media App Clubhouse

This week Facebook’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg made a big announcement that it is working on a Clubhouse clone.

According to the CEO, Facebook is building audio features where users can engage in real-time conversations with others.
Zuckerberg has said that these types of features could be used within groups on its social media platform.

The CEO also announced an upcoming product called Soundbites, which are short-form audio clips that users will be able to listen to in a feed.

The company will build sound editing tools that can be used to produce audio for Soundbites. “It basically is creating this dynamic, algorithmic feed based on your interests around different audio content that you can consume in the background but is this snack-able things,” explained Zuckerberg.

The company has plans to make an Audio Creator Fund to pay users to create content for SoundBites. The company will start to test out Soundbites over the next few months.

Speaking to Casey Newton on the Sidechannel Discord server, Zuckerberg said, “We think that audio is of course also going to be a first-class medium, and there are all these different products to be built across this whole spectrum.”

The new feature is called Live Audio Rooms, and the company expects it will be available to everyone on the Facebook app and Messenger this summer, the company also wrote in a blog post. Live Audio Rooms will be tested within groups on the social media site soon.

“You already have these communities that are organized around interests, and allowing people to come together and have rooms where they can talk, I think it’ll be a very useful thing,” said the CEO.
Users will be able to charge others for access to their Live Audio Rooms through a single purchase or a subscription as a way for creators to monetize the new feature.

In its blog post the company wrote, “At Facebook, we’ve seen the continuing rise of audio on our platforms, from audio calls to audio messages on WhatsApp and Messenger. We’re working to make audio messages easier to record, and more fun — including the ability for people to send familiar sound clips to their friends that range from sound effects like crickets chirping to quotes from popular songs. But we know there are more social experiences to create to help people say what they want to say, discover new voices they haven’t heard before, or exchange ideas at the speed of sound.”

It added, “Right now, it’s still too difficult for most people to do any of this. The best audio creation tools are reserved for the pros. It’s still too hard to discover and share awesome audio content, and too cumbersome to assemble the right group of people to have a conversation about your favorite topic, at the right time. At Facebook, we’ve invested in the full spectrum of audio technologies to solve these problems. From audio quality enhancements, captions, speech translations, and superhuman hearing, our goal is to make audio presence easy, natural, and immersive so you can more fully experience social presence. ”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.