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 on Monday that the company is building audio features that allow users to have real-time conversations with others, similar to the Clubhouse app, which got a lot of fuss in Silicon Valley circles earlier this year.
Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to invest heavily in audio features and build them out over the next few years.
“We think audio will of course also become a premium medium, and all of these different products will be built across this spectrum,” Zuckerberg told Casey Newton on the Sidechannel Discord server Monday.
The new feature is called Live Audio Rooms, and the company expects it to be available to everyone via the Facebook app and Messenger this summer, the company said in a blog post.
The company will test Live Audio Rooms within groups on Facebook.
“You have all these communities organized around interests, and allowing people to come together and have rooms where they can talk, I think it’s going to be really helpful,” he said.
Facebook said it plans to allow users to charge others for access to their Live Audio Rooms through a single purchase or subscription, so creators can monetize the new feature.
The feature comes with little surprise. Facebook has been known to copy products from social media rivals 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 San Francisco startup popularizing real-time audio rooms. . .
Zuckerberg also announced an upcoming product called Soundbites, which are short audio clips, such as jokes, that users can listen to in a feed. Facebook uses an algorithm to determine which audio clips to play for each user. The company is going to build sound editing tools that can be used to produce audio for Soundbites.
“It’s basically creating this dynamic, algorithmic feed based on your interests around different audio content that you can consume in the background, but it’s something you can snack on,” he said.
Facebook said it plans to establish an Audio Creator Fund to pay users to create content for SoundBites. The company will start testing Soundbites in the coming months.
Zuckerberg also said Facebook is working on podcast features that will allow users to discover, share and listen to podcasts in the app.
Finally, an integration with Spotify could allow musicians to more easily share their music on the social network and users could easily play music within the social network, Zuckerberg said. The integration is known internally within Facebook as Project Boombox.