Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during 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 creating audio features where users can have real-time conversations with other people, similar to the Clubhouse app, which gained a lot of feel in circles of Silicon Valley earlier this year.
Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to invest heavily in audio features and develop them in the coming years.
“We believe audio will also be a first-class medium, and there are all these different products that will be built across this spectrum,” Zuckerberg told Casey Newton on Monday on server Sidechannel Discord.
The new feature is called Live Audio Rooms and the company expects it to be available to everyone on the Facebook and Messenger app this summer, the company said in a blog post.
The company will begin 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 to talk to, I think it will be a very useful thing,” he said.
Facebook said it plans to allow users to charge other people for access to their live audio rooms through a single purchase or subscription as a way for creators to earn revenue from the new feature.
The feature comes with little surprise. Facebook is known to copy products from social media rivals like Snap, and the New York Times in February reported that the company was working on a product to compete with Clubhouse, a fast-growing San Francisco startup that popularized it. real-time audio rooms. .
Zuckerberg also announced an upcoming product called Soundbites, which are short audio clips, such as jokes, that users will be able to hear in a feed. Facebook will use an algorithm to determine which audio clips are playing for each user. The company will build sound editing tools that can be used to produce audio for Soundbites.
“It basically creates this algorithmic and dynamic feed based on your interests around different audio content that you can consume in the background, but it’s something suitable for snacking,” he said.
Facebook said it plans to create an Audio Creation Fund to pay users for creating content for SoundBites. The company will begin testing Soundbites over the coming months.
Zuckerberg also said that Facebook is working on podcast features that will allow users to discover, share and listen to podcasts within the app.
Finally, integration with Spotify could allow musicians to share their music more easily on the social network and allow users to easily play music on the social network, Zuckerberg said. The integration is known internally on Facebook as the Boombox Project.