I have a feature request for Clubhouse. Zoom, Meet, Skype, if you’re listening, this is a feature request for you all too. The request is a button to save the previous 60 seconds of audio. Maybe you’re interested because people will share the clips on social media and drive more traffic back to CH 📈🤷♂️. I just want the feature for note-taking 📝. Details follow.
The button
A little floppy disk save icon. 💾. Non intrusive. When clicked, it triggers a save.
Just 60 seconds
The previous 60 seconds of audio are saved. This means a circular buffer of 60 seconds of audio is being stored at all times.
Don’t just blindly save everything, because that’s a lot of data to wade through (and to store). I just want to save the good parts. So when someone says something insightful, I click save. The rest is lost to history.
Respecting Privacy
If no one clicks save, the audio is gone.
If someone does click save, the speakers still can choose not to have their own audio saved. Since everyone’s on their own phone, it’s possible to save an audio clip with e.g. everyone-except-David’s audio, if David decides they don’t want their audio saved.
Maybe David never wants their audio saved except when he explicitly allows it. That’s fine. That’s a setting.
Bonus points
Bonus points for automatic transcription. Additional bonus points for saving the audio clip and its transcription to a Roam database. Still more bonus points for allowing sharing the clips to TikTok or Instagram or wherever, but I don’t use those, so someone else will have to provide the points.
Prior Art
OBS Studio has a feature for recording a circular video buffer. They call it the “replay buffer.” Streamers use it for instant replays, for example. I use it myself for screen recordings sometimes, so I can decide retroactively that something was worth saving, without having to waste gigabytes of storage recording everything.
There have been apps for a long time now offering cameras and audio recorders with this circular buffer feature to allow capturing the past. However, it’s never been integrated into a social product before, as far as I’m aware. Clubhouse, let’s change that.