Clubhouse Launches New Features & Brings Spatial Audio to Android to Enhance Community Experiences

Clubhouse, the social audio app, on Friday launched a number of features to enhance community experiences for creators and users. These features include Universal Search, Clips and Spatial Audio for Android. The app will also add a feature called Replay in early October.

The new features will make finding and sharing rooms, creators, and clubs easier for users. They will also assist creators to grow their audiences on and off the platform. The features come in the wake of 1 billion Backchannel messages – direct messaging – sent between users since the feature was launched mid-July.

Universal Search

Through Universal Search, users can now search for rooms on Clubhouse. The number of average rooms created daily continue to climb, increasing from 300,000 beginning of May to 700,000 at the end of September. Universal Search will allow users to search for people, clubs, live rooms, and future events more quickly to discover any breaking news or interest and to find rooms about specific things happening in the world.

Universal Search is rolling out on iOS and Android starting today. For the first week or two it will stay in the Explore tab while the community provides feedback to continually improve the search results. Thereafter it will move to the hallway.

Clips
Clips makes it easier for creators to share great moments and grow their audiences on Clubhouse. Clips — rolling out today in beta — will allow anyone to share 30-second clips of public rooms, so more people on the Internet can discover and join different clubs. When creators start a room, they can choose whether they want clips enabled. Clips will be on by default for open/public rooms, and creators can toggle them off anytime. The feature is not available for private, social or club rooms. When enabled, users will be able to grab a Clip of the past 30 seconds. This lets them share a preview of the room with others or capture an incredible moment that just happened. People can share Clips of a show to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, iMessage, or WhatsApp — and even save them to their camera rolls for quick editing first. Clips is rolling out in beta to a small group of creators starting today.

Replays

Replays will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Creators will choose whether they want Replays enabled when they start a room. If the feature is on, the room will be discoverable on Clubhouse for as long as creators like — and available for them to download and share anywhere.

Replays make it trivially easy to create great audio content, get discovered by others, and grow audience over time.

Spatial Audio for Android

Spatial Audio, the feature that makes community members feel like they’re more immersed in the conversation or room they’re listening to by making the speakers sound like they’re spaced throughout the room, is being introduced to Android users to further enhance the audio improvements for all users.