WhatsApp for Android: Transcription of voice messages is coming

WhatsApp beta for Android now has voice message transcription

Google’s Pixel devices had a pretty cool feature in Google Messages: if someone sent you a voice message, you didn’t necessarily have to listen to it to find out what it was 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’s bound to come soon, as it was discovered in the latest beta of the application (thanks to WABetaInfo for the find).

The WhatsApp voice message transcription feature needs to be activated. If you are not interested in this feature for security reasons, you will not be forced to use it. You will have to download a voice pack to use it. This pack is proof that all the processing is done on the device, so your voice messages will not be sent from your smartphone to be converted to text (in theory this means that it should work without data).

The feature supports all voice messages, whether you send or receive them. Currently, five languages ​​seem to be supported: 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.

Transcription of voice messages can be useful in several ways

I’m excited about the idea of ​​having voice message transcripts in WhatsApp, but you might not understand why this is so exciting. I think there are many ways and situations where this kind of feature can be very useful in daily life, so let me try to explain some of them.

• Allows people with hearing impairments to use voice messaging without having to use third-party apps or enlist someone’s help, making things instantly more accessible.
• This can help most people “listen” to a voice message even when they are in a place where it is not possible, perhaps because it is too loud or because it is socially inappropriate in some way (for example, if you are tired of listening to the professor in class).
• It also makes it much easier to search through longer voice messages for specific information. No more tediously trying to find where your friend mentioned the address of his birthday party in a 20-minute voice message. Instead, just scroll through the transcript.