Twitter starts testing its Clubhouse-like voice chat rooms

Twitter has started testing its latest experiment, 'Spaces', a Clubhouse-like voice-based chat room.

Users can create a 'Space' that their followers can join to participate in a conversation. Anyone on Twitter can listen in on the conversation, though only the host can control who gets to speak.

"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.