Bubbly wants to be Instagram of voice, updated with sound filters
September 6, 2012 by Gwendolyn Regina T

If you have always wished to expand your vocal repertoire, now there is an easy way.
Fresh from raising a Series E round of USD 5M from Japan’s JAFCO, Bubble Motion‘s voice social networking app turns up the cool factor by taking inspiration from the evolution of their visual counterparts.
Picture filters have taken off big time with mobile apps like Instagram that give users choice in applying various preset tweaks to their pictures to make them look anything from washed out (harkens back to film camera days) to having more color contrast. This feature is so popular with users that every mobile picture app seems to have it now: Mobile social network Path, check. Photoshop Express, check. Facebook Camera, check.
This time, Bubble Motion’s updated Bubbly app allows users to choose from a range of voice filters that includes villain-izing your voice, cartoon-izing it with the high-pitched helium balloon option or you can pretend you’re a singing superstar:

Bubbly as “Twitter with a voice” has now become “Instagram of voice”.
I tried out the various filters and it is super easy to slide through the options and immediately hear your original recording with the new cool filter applied. Once the filter is applied and posted, you can no longer access the original recording to compare the difference.
I had my first voice-filtered Bubbly post in “Sci Fi” – I now sound like an alien.

Bubbly is available in English and Japanese for both iOS and Android and sees 19 million users with “hundreds of celebrities” across Asia and the globe using it. With this version 2.0, the iOD mobile app also supports new languages that includes Korean, Thai and Russian. The company behind the voice blogging app, Bubble Motion, has raised USD 50M in total.
Find out more about SGE’s research arm: SGE Insights, providing customized in-depth research reports to help you navigate the business of technology in Asia.
About The Author
Gwendolyn Regina T - Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Gwen is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of SGE. Previously, she was a partner of early stage technology investment firm, Thymos Capital and she has had two exits, one of which is iHipo. She is also an investor in Padlet, a Y-Combinator startup. Gwen also sits on the Board of Advisors for the Singapore Innovation & Productivity Institute, Steering Commmittee for the Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation Awards 2013, and Board of Advisors for Social Media Week 2013. A frequent public speaker, mentor and judge at various startup bootcamps, events and competitions, Gwen loves meeting founders, developers, designers and scientists across all ages. An alumnus of the National University of Singapore and its University Scholars Programme, Gwen also spent some time in Silicon Valley and is a graduate of the NUS-Stanford University overseas college programme. She is also a mentor at Polish tech startup incubator Gamma Rebels, the Singapore curator for US-headquartered StartupDigest and the Singapore Ambassador for the Sandbox Network - the leading global network of innovators under 30. Gwen has also been a Worldwide Judge for Imagine Cup - the premier student technology competition helmed by Microsoft. She has also spoken in Hong Kong at one of its largest youth conferences, MaD Asia, and was recently in Austria to help envision the future of the country's economy in 2032 on invitation from an Austrian governmental organization. Gwen speaks 3.25 languages, loves physics, travelling, dance and adventure sports. She can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Read other posts by Gwendolyn Regina T






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