By Adedapo Adesanya
Social messaging platform, WhatsApp, has announced the rolling out of voice message transcript.
The company owned by Meta says the new feature will come in handy when users are on the move or in a loud place where they cannot listen to a voice message.
This feature was announced last year for Apple’s iMessage app, a top WhatsApp competitor, with the release of Apple’s software update, iOS 17.
With the new element, voice messages can be transcribed into text to help you keep up with conversations when you’re unable (or perhaps unwilling) to listen to a voice message.
WhatsApp claims its transcripts are generated on the user’s device and no one else can read them.
To access the new WhatsApp feature, users will have to go into settings on the app, select the “Chats” section, and then tap “Voice message transcripts” to turn the feature on. From there, they can select the transcript language of their choice.
The company noted that once this has been done, the user can get a transcript for a voice message by long-pressing it and then tapping the “transcribe” option.
However, this will not automatically transcribe every message for WhatsApp users as the feature is limited.
The company said the voice message transcripts feature is rolling out globally over the coming weeks in select languages.
The supported languages depend on your OS for Apple users. For iOS 16+, these include English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, and Arabic. Meanwhile, iOS 17+ supports languages including Danish, Finish, Malay, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, and Thai.
For Android devices, languages are fewer as users can only access transcripts in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian.
WhatsApp plans to add support for additional languages in the coming months.