Where I live, WhatsApp is the #1 instant messaging app, and globally, most people will agree with me considering it has 2 billion monthly active users. However, some parts of the world don’t rely on WhatsApp as much. Regardless, it’s a fantastic, fully-featured messaging platform.
The myriad of features that the app has is about to get one feature bigger, as voice message transcripts have now been spotted in the beta for the Android version of WhatsApp. I can think of numerous reasons why this feature might be useful, so I’m excited to see when it’ll launch generally.
The WhatsApp For Android Beta Now Has Voice Message Transcription
Google’s Pixel devices had a pretty cool feature in Google Messages where if someone sent you a voice message, you wouldn’t necessarily need to listen to it to find out what it’s about. Instead, Google Messages would listen to it for you and transcribe it so you could read it instead. Now, WhatsApp is going to get the same feature and it is bound to come soon, as it has been spotted in the newest beta of the application (shoutout to WABetaInfo for the finding).
The feature for WhatsApp voice message transcription needs to be enabled, so if you’re not interested in the feature for security reasons, you won’t be forced to use it. You’ll need to download a language pack to be able to use it, and that pack is evidence that all the processing happens on-device, so your voice messages aren’t being sent anywhere off your smartphone to be converted into text (theoretically, this means it should work without data).
The feature will support all voice messages, whether you’re sending them or receiving them. At the moment, there seem to be five supported languages, which are English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Hindi. Of course, we can expect WhatsApp to introduce languages from other regions where the app is widely used.
Voice Message Transcription Is Bound To Be Useful In Several Different Ways
I instantly love the idea of having voice message transcripts in WhatsApp, but you might not get what the excitement is about. I think there are a lot of ways and instances that this kind of feature can be very useful in daily life, so let me try and explain a few of them.
- Allows people with hearing impairments to consume voice messages without needing to use third-party apps or get anyone’s help, which instantly makes things more accessible.
- It can help most people “listen” to a voice note even when they’re in a location where they can’t do so, perhaps because it is too noisy or socially inappropriate in some form (like when you’re tired of listening to the professor in class).
- It will also make parsing through longer voice notes for a specific piece of information a lot easier. You won’t need to struggle to find where your friend mentioned the address for their birthday party in a 20-minute voice message. Just scroll through the transcript instead.
