Once again, Facebook is taking creative notes from its competitors in an effort to keep their massive audience engaged and entertained. The social media platform will be tapping into the rise of audio content production, according to CNN reports. Facebook will join this wave brought on by existing and emerging platforms such podcasts, Twitter and Clubhouse to name a few. Facebook announced the new additions through their official newsroom site on Monday.
“From audio quality enhancements, captions, speech translations, and superhuman hearing, our goal is to make audio presence easy, natural, and immersive so you can more fully experience social presence,” Head of Facebook App Fidji Simo wrote.
Facebook will be providing a few tools that can be used to create and share audio content. The first tool on the list is what they called a “sound studio in your pocket.” Users will be able to access tools to create audio content from inside the Facebook App. Some features included are voice morphing, audio track mixing, speech-to-text and access to Facebook’s Sound Collection.
This pocket sound studio will then allow users to create Soundbites. The new social audio format is described as “short-form, creative audio clips for capturing anecdotes, jokes, moments of inspiration, poems, and many other things we haven’t yet imagined.” Facebook plans to collaborate with a few content creators to work out the product’s kinks over the next couple months.
And if short-form audio content isn’t quite your thing — no worries Facebook has you covered too. The social media giant will allow podcast streaming and searching directly on the app. Streamed podcasts will play whether users are actively using the app or have it open while browsing elsewhere on their device.
Lastly, Facebook plans to begin testing Live Audio Rooms for “communities to engage in topics they care about.” The testing will start within Facebook Groups, which boasts about 1.8 million users every month, according to Facebook’s release. This feature should be available to all users by the end of the summer.
Roomies, what do you think about Facebook making the move into audio spaces?
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