Though it trails slightly behind Twitter and its ‘Spaces’ right now on this front, Clubhouse has announced that closed captions are now available for Clubhouse chats for all iOS users.
The new live caption option enables users to follow along in text format, improving accessibility and expanding usage. It also allows users to tune-in during ‘Sound-Off’ situations should they choose. Furthermore, as with all the recent Clubhouse updates, these look to add more clarity, context, and meaning.
Clubhouse’s closed captions are currently only available in English, and still exclusive to iOS, but there is hearsay that it has 12 languages in beta testing.
As mentioned earlier, closed captions are and have been available on Twitter Spaces, which is arguably now the leading audio-social platform, from the start. Twitter did have the advantage of having a live captioning back-end in place; Periscope provided the layover.
Since Twitter Spaces gained more traction first, the pathway for Clubhouse’s ongoing success is more challenging. The good news is that the app is still growing, especially in India. During the pandemic, a lot of social platforms gained significant market shares from India. In fact, India is now Clubhouse’s currently biggest market, based on download data as per App Annie.
This is where Clubhouse can look to gain the upper hand. With a stronger audience base, and with Twitter failing to gain significant traction in the Indian market, Clubhouse could instead have the religion and benefit from it more which seems to be an ongoing trend for most social platforms originating outside of Asia. While momentum has slowed down in Western markets, the opposite can be said of the app’s rising influence in Asian markets, with India being a significant opportunity. If it can maximize take up in other regions, then Clubhouse may yet see a top spot among the other social networks.
TikTok, which serves as a very good example, is a Chinese-owned platform, but has seen great success and reception in markets outside of China and Asia. One other factor to consider here is accessibility. Since Clubhouse is still just Apple-Only, whether this is intentional or situational is unclear, the opportunity for growth, though still present, is significantly less as opposed to platforms that have rolled out their reach to Apple and Android users alike.
The Wrap
Once Clubhouse establishes a completely solid base, then it can proceed to build itself up, which could, in turn, ensure that it stays for the long-run. Though this is, of course, easier said than done. Setting up its foundation is very challenging, even more so now that it has come in a bit late when considering what the competition has already been able to achieve. It’s not impossible, it’s very possible actually, just really hard.
So while Clubhouse may have fallen a bit behind, it still has an avenue towards ongoing success. Without identifying it’s own niche just yet, current observations do lead to Clubhouse potentially being a key connective app for certain sectors and demographic groups.
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