Clubhouse adds text chat for those times you might not want to talk

Clubhouse app (Image credit: Bryan M. Wolfe / iMore)

What you need to know

Clubhouse has added a new in-room chat option that allows people to talk via text.
Creators will be able to decide whether or not to enable the text-based chat.
The new feature is rolling out now.

Clubhouse, an app that was designed to help people speak to each other in a virtual room, has announced the arrival of text-based chat.

While Clubhouse spawned similar features in apps from Twitter and Spotify that are all about speaking to each other using our voices, the app is now going in the opposite direction. In a blog announcement, Clubhouse said that it is enabling "In-Room Chat" to allow people to send messages even while the call is ongoing.

Don't want to miss your moment to share a killer joke? Want to put in a song request? Want to react with the 🔥 emoji? You can now drop it in the in-room chat.For creators, in-room chat will offer another touchpoint with audiences in a room and provide a way to get feedback in real time. We hope that this will make conducting quick polls or sourcing questions from the audience that much easier, and bring engagement to the next level.

Clubhouse confirmed in the announcement that creators will be able to decide whether to enable In-Room Chat for their rooms, or not. And once they're enabled mods will be able to delete messages that they don't think fit in with a room's tone. Chats will also hang around after the conversation has finished and will be part of the Replays for those who couldn't be there live.

In-Room Chat should be rolling out to everyone with the latest version of Clubhouse installed right now. If you don't yet see it, make sure to update and if you don't yet have Clubhouse installed you can bag it from the App Store now. It's free, after all.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.