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 gained a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley circles earlier this year. .
Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to invest heavily in audio features and build them in the coming years.
“We believe that sound will, of course, be a first-class medium, and there are all these different products that need to be built across this spectrum,” Zuckerberg told Casey Newton on Monday on the Sidechannel Discord server.
The new feature is called Live Audio Rooms, and the company expects it to be available to everyone from Facebook and Messenger this summer, the company said in a blog post.
The company will begin testing Live Audio Rooms in Facebook groups.
“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 it will be a very useful thing,” he said.
Facebook has stated that it intends to allow users to charge others for access to their live audio cameras through a single purchase or subscription as a way for creators to generate money from the new feature.
The function comes with little surprise. Facebook was known to copy products from rivals on social networks such as Snap, and the New York Times in February reported that the company was working on a product to compete with Clubhouse, a fast-growing company in San Francisco, which popularized real-time audio cameras. .
Zuckerberg also announced a future product called Soundbites, which are 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 clips are played for each user. The company will build sound editing tools that can be used to produce audio for Soundbites.
“It basically creates this dynamic, algorithmic feed based on your interests around the different audio content that you can consume in the background, but it’s something that can be tasted,” he said.
Facebook has said it intends to create an audio creation fund to pay users to create content for SoundBites. The company will begin testing Soundbites in the next few months.
Zuckerberg also said that Facebook is working on podcast features that will allow users to discover, share and listen to podcasts within the application.
Finally, integration with Spotify could make it easier for musicians to share their music on the social network and allow users to easily play music on the social network, Zuckerberg said. The integration is known internally within Facebook as Project Boombox.