Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the 56th Munich Security Conference in Munich, Southern Germany, on February 15, 2020.
Christof Stache | AFP | Getty Images
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday that the company is building audio features where users can have real-time conversations with others, similar to the Clubhouse app, which received a lot of attention in Silicon Valley circles earlier this year.
Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to invest heavily in audio features and expand in the coming years.
“We think sound is obviously going to be a first-class medium, too, and that all of these different products need to be built into this whole spectrum,” Zuckerberg told Casey Newton on the Sidechannel Discord server on Monday.
The new feature is called Live Audio Rooms, and the company expects it to be available to everyone this summer on the Facebook app and Messenger, the company said in a blog post.
The company will start testing Live Audio Rooms within groups on Facebook.
“You already have these communities that are organized around interests, and that allow people to come together and have rooms where they can talk, I think that would be a very useful thing,” he said.
Facebook said it intends to enable users to pay others for access to their Live Audio Rooms through a single purchase or subscription as a way for creators to earn the new feature.
The feature comes with little surprise. Facebook is known to copy products from competitors on social media such as Snap, and The New York Times reported in February that the company was working on a product to compete with Clubhouse, a fast-growing company in San Francisco that is real -time is popular. sound rooms.
Zuckerberg has also announced an upcoming product called Soundbites, short audio clips, such as jokes, that users will be able to listen to in a feed. Facebook will use an algorithm to determine which audio snippets are being played for each user. The company will build sound editing tools that can be used to produce sound for Soundbites.
“It’s basically creating this dynamic, algorithmic input based on your interests around different audio content that you can use in the background, but it’s a fun thing to do,” he said.
Facebook has said it plans to create an Audio Creator Fund to pay users to create content for SoundBites. The company will begin testing Soundbites over the next few months.
Zuckerberg also said Facebook is working on podcast features that allow users to discover, share and listen to podcasts within the app.
Finally, an integration with Spotify could allow musicians to more easily share their music on the social network, enabling users to easily play music within the social network, Zuckerberg said. The integration is known internally within Facebook as Project Boombox.