Clubhouse rolls out support for 5 Indian languages on Android

Social audio platform Clubhouse is rolling out support for 13 new languages, including five Indian languages on its app, amid a big International push as the company looks to compete with a growing number of rivals in the space.

Starting on November 3, Clubhouse will support local languages such as Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam on Android with iOS rollout expected soon. As part of this experience, the social audio app will now show in-app prompts, descriptions, topics, notifications and community guidelines in these languages.

"We have always said we are building Clubhouse for everyone and we want people to be able to experience Clubhouse in a way that feels native to them. This launch will make Clubhouse more native, easier to navigate and more accessible to billions more people around the world" said Clubhouse cofounder Paul Davison.

The company said this is the first wave of language support and they will add more languages in the future.

This launch comes at a time when Clubhouse is facing increased competition from the likes of Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, LinkedIn, Slack and Telegram, which have either launched or are working on their own competing products.

In recent months, the company has announced several new features such as Backchannel, Universal Search, Clips, Pinned Links, Music Mode, Replays and support for spatial audio among others.

In September, the firm had announced its first cohort of six creators from India that will be part of its accelerator programme 'Creator First'. Through this programme, Clubhouse plans to help these creators with production and creative development, help them promote their show, and provide financial support either through a monthly stipend or matching creators with brands.

On November 3, Clubhouse also announced that Indian musician Anirudh Deshmukh will be the app icon for this month.

"It's been incredible to see the creativity, conversation, community that has happened on Clubhouse, specifically in India. It's been such a huge part of our journey over the past year. We are incredibly grateful to be able to build a product for the user community in India" Davison said.

The launch could also provide a much-needed user boost in the country where it has witnessed a slowing user growth rate in recent months after seeing a major spike in its user base in India in the months of May and June, after the launch of its Android app and the company dropping the invite-only tag.

Clubhouse had clocked 505,000 downloads on Android in India in August, as compared to 1.3 million downloads in July and 5.6 million downloads in June, according to app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Overall, the app witnessed 558,000 downloads in August, from 1.4 million downloads in July and 5.9 million downloads in June.

Aarthi Ramamurthy, head of International at Clubhouse said that they are currently hosting about 700,000 rooms per day, from 300,000 rooms per day earlier this year and an average user currently spends about 70 minutes per day on the platform."For us, that's the kind of metric that we want to track where we want to make sure that both creators and listeners are finding value or building communities on the platform" she said.