Swell’s Social Platform Lets People Talk Online

Audio-driven social media platform Swell announced its international launch ahead of the virtual SXSW festival, which runs March 16-20.

“Swell is democratizing voice by enabling any-time audio conversations,” Swell Co-Founder and CEO Sudha Varadarajan, said in a Monday (March 15) press release. “While most social audio companies are focused on real-time audio chat, Swell frees up its users to keep talking on their own time. It’s easier to stay connected with friends, family and co-workers when you don’t have to coordinate schedules. The asynchronous audio format also results in more thoughtful replies and to encourage meaningful discourse, we don’t have any ads on the platform.”

The new voice-based social platform offers asynchronous audio conversations, which means that participants do not have to be online at the same time. The first platform to focus on this exclusively on asynchronous audio conversations, Swell lets users create a 5-minute voice message that can also contain links and photos.

“With the current rise of audio, related hardware products and the verticalization of social media, voice-based apps and platforms are poised for growth,” per the release.

Swell’s audio-first platform gets people away from screens and facilitates conversations, the company said. Users can talk with people across the globe about any topic. Listeners can reply in audio at any tie to advance the conversation.

Every user gets a free swellcast.com web page for sharing on social media. There is also an HTML widget people can use to add voice conversations to any website. The web capabilities give people a way to increase the reach of their audio messages.

In separate news reported earlier this year, social platform Clubhouse is an audio-based chat-room with 2 million active weekly users. With Clubhouse, there is no liking, sharing, or emoji reactions. Instead, Clubhouse users actually have real conversations in topic-oriented chat rooms. Users can listen in, launch their own audio content, or chime in.