Oh yeah! There are no pictures. But that is one of the positives when evaluating the potential of Clubhouse, the high-profile leader of the emerging category of Social Audio platform providers. Credit Jeremiah Owyang for compiling this stellar assessment of “The Future of Social Audio: Startups, Roadmap, Business Models, and a Forecast.” As is his custom and talent, Owyang is very thorough, thoughtful and far-sighted. He describes Social Audio, not as a technology, but as an emerging marketplace and ecosystem built on the value of what Opus Research calls Conversational Intelligence.

He also explains that Clubhouse is only one of 32 (and counting) other providers of Social Audio Platforms. ProductHunt, in its weekly digest has started a tally of tools providers to enhance one’s Clubhouse experience. Included are utilities for building bios that stands out, creating avatars, measuring and moderating one’s audience and creating sound effects. Twitter, for instance, began a limited trial of its “Spaces” service in December 2020. If they are true to form Facebook, Google, Apple and its international counterparts like Tencent will join the fray shortly.

The “Future of Social Audio Report” also categorizes 6 new product opportunities including analytics, audio management, an application marketplace, enterprise software, consulting and voice talent. Visit Bret Kinsella’s Voicebot.ai site for updates of the inevitable addition of what he is calling Voice AI to fill perceived gaps or deficiencies in Clubhouse’s capabilities. In this article, for instance, Bret notes the value of using flavors of automated speech processing for transcription, emotion detection and authentication. I agree that all of these will prove valuable, but Clubhouse feels like a closed system at this point and it is unclear how such resources will be linked to its corpus of stored voice data files.

Feels like a Fairy Tale

In his analysis, Owyang starts with a nod to a popular fairy tale, calling Social Audio a “Goldilocks” medium. It is more than text-only and not as immersive (or draining) as a succession of video meetings. He also invokes the quaint era in domestic telephony when “Party Lines” were a thing. Here’s where there is a fallacy in his logic. He claims that Party Lines enabled “friends and strangers” to “dial up to audio-based conversations regardless of location.”

That doesn’t happen to be true. Party-lines were the product of a scarcity of switching equipment in rural areas which extended from inception of telephony in the 1800s until the early 1980s. <>. Sure, it spawned special services like “distinctive rings” so that two rings would signal the a member of the Hatfield family, for instance, should not pick up on a call intended for a McCoy.

Social Audio, by contrast, shares much more in common with so-called GAB lines in the 1980s and 1990s. GAB stood for “Group Access Bridge”. Individuals could reach these shared lines through what were then called “pay-per-call” services, primarily 900 numbers (using long-distance facilities) or 976-xxxx on a local exchange. This article in The Morning Call <> tells you more than you might want to know about such services. For as little as $0.69 a minute, people could join an audio party. Advertising, not to different from the promo messages for Clubhouse rooms, would attract specific demographics or interest groups.

The services generated hundreds of millions of dollars for carriers and service providers as part of a multi-billion pay-per-call industry that included stock information, horoscopes, psychics, sportsliine and – it’s downfall – porn.

Technology Upgrades to a Doomed Service

Leading carriers in North America, MCI, Sprint and the Bells at the time, did not walk away from pay-per-call willingly. Regulatory action by both the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission eventually attached enough restrictions of the service to force their hand. That included giving subscribers the ability to block access to the services, so that parents could prevent children from running up large bills or accessing inappropriate material.

Before the death of the industry, automated voice information services, sometimes called Audiotex, grew into a multi-billion enterprise for carriers and information publishers alike. One example of innovation is Tellme Networks <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellme_Networks> , which delivered advertiser supported audio content based on primitive natural language input starting in 1999. As a self-styled Voice Portal it delivered directory assistance/call completion, stock quotes, theatre information and bookings, and queries of Web sites. Think of it as a dial-up pre-cursor to Siri and, as a matter of fact, some of its core IP resides with leading enterprise intelligent assistant provider [24]7.ai and its founding team have been instrumental in launching Google Assistant and news organizer, Clipboard.com.

Another innovator was Keen.com, which is much closer to a Social Audio network business model. In 2001, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal called it a stand-out among “the few dot-com survivors. It ran “a Web site listing thousands of people who give paid advice, over the phone, to people who click on their names. Portraying itself as a marketplace of advisers on a wide range of mainstream topic.” Thus its core stock-in-trade, as with Clubhouse, Facebook, Twitter and any other social platform, is user-generated content.

Keen.com started out by enlisting experts to provide pride advice regarding business, tax accounting, legal issues and such. They were able to name their own price for a three minute phone call. In 1999, its founder referred to his idea as “eBay for Human Capital” and was able to raise $60 million in seed money from Benchmark Capital. Pretty soon Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures, Inktomi Corp, Integral Capital Partners and other also invested. Maybe it’s not Adreesen Horowitz granting it Unicorn status, as with Clubhouse, but it was a big endorsement.

To cut to the chase, two years into its experience and one dot-com bubble later, roughly 9 out of 10 calls to “KeenSpeakers” were to psychic hotlines and another 8% were essentially phone sex.

Telemedia Reborn

Keen.com and the doomed pay-per-call industry serve as cautionary tales to Social Audio true believers. Clubhouse and its cohort are, by no means, destined to follow the pay-per-call precedent. Before there were online dating sites and apps or other forms of social media, GAB lines served an important function for anyone who had a phone. Audiotex did fuel a multibillion dollar business before its reputation was tarnished by phone sex and billing issues. Yet it feels like Clubhouse is violating some basic rules for success in the social networking world. It is best thought of a subset of a broader opportunity called Telemedia which was a superset of services that grew out of direct marketing media, that incorporated the use of toll-free 800 numbers for carrying out commerce and transactions plus all of the flavors of pay-per-call information and entertainment services and, of course, GAB lines.

Unlike its Telemedia precursors, Clubhouse has a very exclusive and closed feel about it. It is iOS only (just for iPhone owners). It is “invitation only” (by the way I have invitations left if you are interested). Plus, it has often been characterized as a #FOMO (“fear of missing out”) engine. It started when Elon Musk made a high-profile appearance in late January. It became “Must-hear Audio” for its targeted demographic. It was what R “Ray” Wang called “its magical mega adoption moment (MMAM).”

Part of the FOMO framing is based on Clubhouse meetings being ephemeral. Yet, the Musk interview can be heard on YouTube and elsewhere and there is really no way to prevent all conversations from being recorded. Owyang’s industry forecast anticipates as much by seeing an emerging demand for analytics, indexing and audience measurement.

Truth be told, I very much want Social Audio to succeed and believe an open platform with low barriers to entry for shared, contemporaneous audio experience will spawn a new market for automated voice assistants as well. It has the potential to be Audiotex – and Telemedia – done right.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants