Clubhouse will now let users interact in voice rooms over text. For creators, in-room chat will offer another touchpoint with audiences in a room and provide a way to get feedback in real-time. Rooms with text chat enabled will have a dedicated icon at the bottom left of the screen. Clubhouse had started allowing anyone — even those without an account — to listen to conversations taking place on the platform through Clubhouse for Web since last month. Clubhouse also recently rolled out support for 13 new languages on the social audio platform.
Clubhouse announced in a blog post that the platform wants everyone to be able to join live conversations, whether by voice or text. Named In-Room Chat, the new feature is similar the feature offered by Skype and Zoom — a text chat area within a live room.
Voice room moderators will be able to delete chat messages, and creators can choose to disable text chat when starting a new room. The audience will also have options to report comments and provide feedback to moderators. This will help in making sure that text chat is a safe space. However, this poses a challenge as moderating comments in rooms with hundreds or thousands of people will certainly not be an easy task.
There will be a dedicated icon at the bottom left of the screen for rooms that have the in-Room Chat feature enabled. After the live audio session has ended, all the messages sent during the session can be read by anyone listening to the Replay of the room. Clubhouse is also hoping that the new feature will help creators conduct quick polls or source questions on a live chat with people.
Clubhouse expanded its platform to the Web in January 2022, so that anyone can listen to a live chat. It does not require listeners to have the Clubhouse app installed on their devices or signed in with the platform. Separately, Clubhouse is working on bringing an option to let users share sessions they are attending on the app on any social media network or messaging app.
In December 2021, Clubhouse had rolled out support for new 13 new languages on the social audio platform, bringing the total number of local languages it supports to 26. The languages included Arabic, Bengali, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Farsi/ Persian, Hausa, Igbo, Marathi, Nepali, Somali, Thai, Turkish, and Yoruba. Users who want to use a localised version of Clubhouse can now switch to one of these languages.