Few days after announcing the launch of “Live Rooms” for Instagram, the team of engineers at Facebook seems to be working on another feature which might be called Audio Rooms.
Audio Room is believed to have been inpired by the popular audio-based chat application – Clubhouse.
As spotted by tipster, Alessandro Paluzzi, Audio Room’s feature appears to still be in the early stages of its development.
#Instagram is working on audio rooms
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) March 6, 2021pic.twitter.com/5TI6YzLi9A
The latest development on the app comes nearly a month after a report suggested that Facebook is working on its own version of the Clubhouse.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder, made an appearance on Clubhouse last month, where he participated in a chat about the future of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).
Alessandro Paluzzi also posted screenshots on Twitter that shows a new microphone icon within the Instagram DM section.
Another screenshot Paluzzi posted shows a “Loading” message next to the user profile at the bottom of the screen that indicates the initialising of the audio chat room.
#Instagram is working on end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) chats
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) March 6, 2021
The microphone icon is also there, which, presumably, would mute and unmute users, and also be used to exit the Audio Room.
If the development is accurate, Facebook will hope to gain prominence in a new avenue after disrupting the short video segment with Instagram Reels, previously dominated by TikTok.
In another post on Twitter, Paluzzi claims that Instagram is also working on end-to-end encryptions for DMs.
With this, Instagram would essentially be encrypts messages sent from the sender, and decrypts them to the receiver, to avoid snooping in between.
The encryption feature is already available on another Facebook-owned platform – WhatsApp.
