Telegram 7.6 brings Clubhouse-like features to the Android

It seems that everyone is trying to imitate the Clubhouse these days, as after the hype the app made recently and not being available on the Android platform currently, everyone is trying to exploit the situation to bring the feature of audio rooms to its application. After Twitter launched this feature as Spaces, and Facebook that works when you bring it to its main app as well as to Instagram, Telegram will no longer be a bystander.



Voice chat rooms are nothing new to Telegram, the app actually brought them to groups last December, and any Telegram group could become a voice chat room that works in parallel with the traditional text and media chat, but now the app has gone a step further and brings them to the channels as well.


    


In a new beta update to Android (version 7.6), Telegram allows channel owners to host a voice chat just like Clubhouse. This feature can be accessed by clicking on the three dots on the channel information page, selecting the option to "Start Voice chat", then they can choose whether they want to host the audio chat using their personal profile or channel name. Administrators can also record the entire voice chat, and it will be saved as an audio file in the "Saved Messages" list for later listening or sharing.

     

In the voice chat window, users can enable the chat overlay mode that displays a blue microphone icon on the right edge of the screen, allowing them to speak, see who is speaking, mute or unmute the conversation, or leave the audio discussion even when they are outside the application. After administrators finish their first voice chat, a new icon appears at the top of the channel's info page to enable them to quickly host a voice chat the next time.

      

Besides the voice chat feature, this beta update also comes with a new "chat list swipe gesture" in the chat settings that allow users to change the default behavior when swiping the chat left or right. The default for this setting is the archive option allowing users to archive a specific chat, but it can be changed to the pin, read, delete, or mute option.

                             

The forwarding flow has been slightly improved as well, and it now has an option to cancel the forwarding completely to choose another chat as the destination (the option's UI is not showing correctly for some reason now as you can see in this screenshot, but it will be fixed in a feature release for sure), and finally, if you open a conversation with a contact you haven't talked to before, you will now see a new random welcome sticker that you can tap to send to him.