Intre­pid com­mu­ni­ty man­agers eager to keep up with the lat­est trends in social media might be sur­prised to find that voice is mak­ing a come­back over vision.

The mas­sive suc­cess of social media rests on the dis­sem­i­na­tion of pic­tures, videos and text mes­sages. But a cou­ple of star­tups are encour­ag­ing us to return to what was for mil­len­nia our prin­ci­pal means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing: the human voice.

The return of the voice

The new Dub­bler app, for exam­ple, pro­vides a quick-and-easy way to record one minute of audio and share it on Face­book, Twit­ter or with the Dub­bler com­mu­ni­ty. Avail­able on iOA and Android, the app also allows users to include play­ful sound fil­ers (a kind of audio ver­sion of Instagram’s pho­to fil­ters) as well as a cov­er pho­to snapped with a smart­phone camera.

Dub­bler was devel­oped by App­sur­di­ty, a Bay Area start­up found­ed by Matthew Mur­phy, who said:

“I saw a lot of peo­ple tex­ting and post­ing pho­tos on social media, but no one real­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing with their voice. The whole idea is you don’t text your per­son­al­i­ty, you voice it. We want­ed to give peo­ple a plat­form to share their voice and be heard.”

The free Dub­bler app has seen over 200,000 down­loads since its launch in beta in Decem­ber –over 55,000 of them in the first 24 hours after com­ing out of beta in ear­ly March. Not bad for a start­up that’s only just start­ed doing any mar­ket­ing: it’s take-off was gen­er­at­ed by word of mouth after Mur­phy shared it with fam­i­ly and friends along with a few well-cho­sen social net­work influ­encers (hip-hop artists Was Khal­i­fa and Com­mon amongst them).

An emerg­ing com­mu­ni­ty for com­mu­ni­ty managers

The com­mu­ni­ty the app has gar­nered is diverse, with Dub­bler users shar­ing jokes, poet­ry, freestyle rap and even record­ings of their own laugh­ter. An audio com­mu­ni­ty in the mak­ing, no less. And it looks like that com­mu­ni­ty is going to expand.

Not only is App­sur­di­ty devel­op­ing two addi­tion­al voice-cen­tered apps, but Chica­go-based start­up Eevz­drop is also poised to enter the social audio space with a new app sim­i­lar to Dub­bler, but with a geo­t­ag­ging fea­ture, too, that lets oth­er users search for shared sound clips by location.

Social con­tent is shift­ing from the eye to the mouth, it would seem. That’s an inter­est­ing devel­op­ment for con­tent managers.