Twitter starts testing Spaces, its Clubhouse-like voice chat rooms

Twitter has started testing its latest experiment ‘Spaces’. Twitter Spaces is a Clubhouse-like voice-based chat room. It’s starting out with a small group of users who will be allowed to create Spaces for their followers.

Twitter announced last month that it would soon start testing Spaces with the first group of users being women and people from marginalised backgrounds. The announcement was made from the Twitter Spaces team who briefed on how the first test will work out among the people selected for this experiment. The first group will basically be a feedback group with whom the Twitter Spaces team will communicate through DMs.

The reason behind launching Twitter Spaces was also explained as “the human voice can bring a layer of connectivity to twitter through emotion, nuance and empathy often lost in text. we see this with voice tweets & voice dms. sometimes 280 isn't enough, and voice gives people another way to join the conversation.”

There are some features currently in testing on Twitter Spaces. These include reactions similar to hand gestures, live transcriptions, reporting and blocking, and the ability to share tweets. Twitter Spaces is currently available in beta on iOS. The audio-based conversations will be host-moderated featuring speakers and listeners.

To create a Twitter Space, you’ll have to hold and press the compose button on the iOS app. You can also create a Space through Twitter Fleets. The feature will obviously show up only for the select group of users for Twitter Spaces. Although limited to select people, the host can invite anyone to join their Twitter Space. Hosts also have control over the Space with the ability to allow who speaks among the invitees.