Facebook Audio Rooms Rolls Out With Clubhouse-Like Features; Can It Beat Competition?

Facebook has been steadily expanding its offerings to include new features and even hardware. Now, the popular social media platform has introduced a new audio-based feature to take on Clubhouse and Twitter. The new Facebook Audio Rooms has just gone live and seems to be largely similar to the trendsetter Clubhouse app.

Facebook Audio Rooms Launch

Presently, the Facebook Audio Rooms are available for users in the US only. The feature is expected to be available to everyone in the coming months. "We'll test Live Audio Rooms in Groups, making it available to the 1.8 billion people using Groups every month and the tens of millions of active communities on Facebook," the company said in a blog post.

The new Facebook audio room allows users to share their story or join in on a global conversation "in any way, anytime, anywhere - even on a bad hair day without any makeup - or in your car or on a run," Facebook says.

Much like Clubhouse, the Facebook Live Audio Rooms will also include several public figures who will host conversations with other experts and even fans. Plus, Facebook users can listen to podcasts, which even ups the competition with apps like Spotify. The company claims over 170 million people follow podcast pages, and now, they can directly listen to podcasts in the coming months.

Facebook Audio Room: Can It Take On Competition?

Facebook has lately been caught up in several lawsuits and anti-trust cases. At the same time, the company has been trying to up its game with several new offerings. For instance, the Facebook Oculus VR platform has been trying out new things, like VR advertising. And now we have the Facebook Audio Rooms.

Facebook is also reportedly building tools for influencers to explore the audio platform. For instance, new tools for audio creation like speech-to-text, voice morphing, AI-based noise cancellation while recording, and more. These tools are deemed 'powerful enough for the pros'. Facebook seems to have an upper hand with Audio Rooms as it automatically caters to billions of people at once. Without powerful tools and influencers in its basket, the new Facebook Audio Room could be a new gateway for advertising.