WhatsApp is rolling out a new feature that lets users turn voice messages into text. This is designed to help people who can’t listen to a message right away because of where they are or other reasons.
The WhatsApp voice message transcriptions are created on the user’s device. This is great for privacy because it means the data won’t be sent to WhatsApp, and any outside company can’t access the audio or text. The messages are also protected by end-to-end encryption, which means no one else, including WhatsApp, can access them. Whether or not the sender knows the message has been heard depends on the user’s privacy settings.
Users can turn on this feature in the app’s settings under “Chats” and “Voice message transcripts.” From there, the choices are to enable or disable it and pick their preferred language. Once that is finished, users can transcribe messages. To transcribe a voice message, users just need to long-press the message and select “transcribe.” Once this is activated, the person receiving the voice message can read the transcript, but the person who sent it cannot.
Only a few languages are available now, depending on a user’s device, but more will be added soon. Android supports English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. Apple users have many more choices but can only use this feature if Siri is enabled. Different languages are supported depending on the iOS version: iOS 16 and newer support languages like:
- English
- Spanish
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Turkish
- Chinese
- Arabic
The languages that are added with iOS 17 and above are:
- Danish
- Finnish
- Hebrew
- Malay
- Norwegian
- Dutch
- Swedish
- Thai
Transcripts will roll out globally throughout the next weeks but are limited to the abovementioned languages. If you need help using it, WhatsApp has a guide on how it works.
Source: WhatsApp
