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Zuckerberg also announced an upcoming product called Soundbites, short-form audio clips that users will be able to listen to in a feed.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced that the company is building audio features where users can engage in real-time conversations with others, similar to the app Clubhouse, which gained a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley circles earlier this year.
Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to invest a lot in audio features and build them out over the coming years.
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 said in a blog post.
The company will start to test Live Audio Rooms within groups on Facebook.
Facebook said it plans to allow users 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.
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 in February reported that the company was working on a product to compete with Clubhouse, a fast-growing San Francisco start-up that popularized real-time audio rooms.
Zuckerberg also announced an upcoming product called Soundbites, short-form 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 is creating this dynamic, algorithmic feed based on your interests around different audio content that you can consume in the background but is this snackable thing,” he said.
Facebook said it 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.