Twitter has begun exploring its new experiment, ‘Spaces,’ a Clubhouse-like voice-based chat room.
Users may create a ‘Room’ that their followers can enter to take part in a chat. Anyone on Twitter can listen to the chat, but only the host can control who’s going to talk.
“The human voice can bring a layer of connectivity to Twitter through emotion, nuance and empathy often lost in text,” the official account of Twitter Spaces said. “We see this with voice Tweets and voice DMs. Sometimes 280 characters are not enough, and the voice gives people another way to join the conversation.
Twitter had released a teaser of the feature earlier and said that it would prioritize marginalized communities, aka groups that are more likely to be subjected to abuse and harassment on its platform.
In addition to the launch of Spaces, Twitter said it’s developing other features for testing, including reactions similar to hand gestures, live transcriptions, reporting and blocking, and the ability to share Tweets in Spaces.
Twitter last month said it’s planning to add automated captions to audio and video on the platform by early 2021, a feature that would help people with disabilities access the service in a much meaningful way.
It’s, however, unclear when transcriptions might be available in voice tweets.
