Anchor makes it super easy for anyone to hear, share, and create interactive streams of audio called stations. It’s like radio (or podcasting), but bite-sized. Anchor has introduced a new feature called Discussions.

Discussions is a brand new way to interact with the audio you love on Anchor. You can now chat (with text) about whatever you’re listening to, right from within Anchor. Discussions is available now for iOS and Android.

Anchor is really proud of how easy they’ve made it to interact with audio and creators in ways that were previously impossible. You can interact by applauding the parts you like, calling in with a question, or adding audio to your own station. But, Anchor noticed that listeners want to have longer discussions about what they’re hearing.

We’ve seen people trading call-ins in an effort to have an ongoing conversion, or taking it to other platforms for more in-depth (but relatively inconvenient) discussions. So rather than force our users to find other ways to have meaningful conversations around audio, we decided to enable it right inside Anchor.

This is how the Discussions feature works:

• Start listening to a station.
• Tap the new Discussion button on any segment.
• Discuss the segment you’re listening to with the station’s host and other listeners, as much as you want.

Anchor points out that if a host loves what you had to say, they can add it to their segment as a pop-up comment so that all their other listeners will see it (even if those listeners don’t want to join in the full discussion.) Discussions will stay attached to their relevant content, so if someone adds your segment to their own station, or if you turn a segment into a permanent episode, the conversation will be maintained.