Yappa to Introduce Audio/Video Social Commenting Tool

Yappa World, a southern California startup, later this month will debut a free audio and video commenting tool for websites and blogs.

Yappa lets users leave audio-only or video comments called Yaps that they embed into the Yappa plugin on any article or blog post, from within their mobile browsers, without downloading an app.

"With Yappa, users can now socialize through actually talking," said Yappa CEO and Co-Founder Jennifer Dyer in a statement. "Publishers can create their own social media environment, and, because communication is via an audio/visual feed, it brings more civility to online discourse and allows both publishers and end users to build beautiful communities where debate and comments are non-toxic."

Users can be flagged for profanity, pornography, bullying, and hate speech by admins and other users and banned from the site. Each community using Yappa establishes its own standards for etiquette and acceptable language.

"Yappa greatly increases retention, engagement, interactions, and brand loyalty for bloggers, web publishers, and all online communities," said Kiaran Sim, chief operating officer at Yappa, in a statement. "We truly believe that text-based commenting is archaic. Many times comment sections are littered with unproductive toxicity. It's much harder to be rude if you're using your voice."

Yappa transcribes every comment, indexes the key words, and allows the organic conversation to be searchable. Yappa also delivers back-end analytics through its patent-pending publisher dashboard features.

Yappa works on any computer with a webcam and microphone, as well as on mobile devices.