Dubbler officially launched for Android and iOS today, but it’s been in open testing since the beginning of the year with 500,000 downloads so far. The app allows you to quickly record your own voice, song—basically any audio you want up to 60 seconds—and then play with the file through filters that can add autotune or otherwise augment your voice.
“Voice has been how we’ve communicated since the beginning of time,” says Matthew Murphy, the founder of Appsurdity, the Silicon Valley startup that built Dubbler. “But voicing a comment on your blog, Facebook FB -2.01% or Twitter has just not been available so we built a simple product that does that.”
The comparison to Vine is obvious (if you use or know the video community, which seems overrun with teenagers compared to its earliest days) in that Dubbler’s offering a low barrier for use and the prospect of a community with whom you can share and quickly voice replies. The service encourages you to take or use a photo as a lander for your audio clip and to mark each with relevant keywords as hashtags much like Twitter and Instagram do.
While the goofy component to Dubbler—let’s just reiterate, there is a cat voice filter—seems comparable to the graffiti and tone of the photos sent over temporary picture-sharing app SnapChat, But Dubbler posts aren’t throwaways, as only about 5-10% of its uploaded recordings have been kept private. The app’s terms of service forbid sexual or threatening content, with users self-policing and the Dubbler team banning as necessary.
Murphy subscribes to the notion that SnapChat’s ‘sexting’ potential has been overstated, anyway. It’s a simple argument: “College kids don’t use apps much for sexting, [SnapChat] is for inside jokes and to be silly. They use our filters to make their voice sound funny.”
Disguise is also supposed to be part of the app’s value. Filters might help unhappy people share very personal information more comfortably with support communities on the platform; Dubbler has already had an anti-bully campaign with its early users.
If Dubbler can stick, Murphy sees potential in its use for websites’ comments sections and through licensing celebrity voices (Morgan Freeman, please) as premium filters. Another potential would be voice comparisons in which the app mixes your voice with a friend’s to tell you how similar you each sound.
There’s potential for the music industry, too. Dubbler’s already working with DJs to record clips of their sets, and theoretically artists could start easily including short messages or riffs with the tweets and posts they use to engage their fans. Dubbler will have to remain vigilant, however, of users posting music clips they don’t have the rights to share.
About half of Dubbler posts live within the app and half on other social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Google GOOG -1.85%+. Unlike Vine, Dubbler doesn’t have its own social media giant to nurture it along to widespread adoption, so the risk of the app flaming out or falling prey to a bigger player is real. But the company hopes its eight months of development and coding will make potential rivals like Instagram want to partner, not compete. So Appsurdity is working with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple AAPL +0.39% (Yahoo YHOO -1.74%‘s now on the radar through Tumblr) to embed itself within the social fabric of our smartphone usage.
“With a community like ours you need scale and enough numbers to count and matter,” Murphy says. Even with more serious business use cases on the horizon, Dubbler first needs teens and millennials to decide the world is ready for their big cat-voiced solo.
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