Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook is working on a Clubhouse clone

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.

“We think that audio is of course also going to be a first-class medium, and there are all these different products to be built across this whole 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 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.

“You already have these communities that are organized around interests, and allowing people to come together and have rooms where they can talk, I think it’ll be a very useful thing,” he said.

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.

:story: CNBC