If you're someone like me who loves receiving and sending voice notes to communicate on WhatsApp, you'll know that as great as they might be, trying to navigate through longer voice notes can be annoying. What haven't you responded to? At what point did they mention they bought a 24K gold-plated S24 Ultra?
Well, a new feature coming to WhatsApp for Android (that's been on iOS for quite some time now) will fix this problem, and that's text transcription of voice notes. It's been seen in the beta for WhatsApp, so let's talk about it.
You'll Be Able To Read Voice Notes Before You Listen To Them
So, let me paint a picture from my own experiences. Someone sends a voice note to you, and it's 11 minutes long, but that's not too much of a problem because you like listening to this person, and you can crank the speed up to get through it quicker. But, there's something that they mentioned that you want to listen to again, but you can't easily find where it is in the voice note because of how long it is.
That's one reason why the upcoming voice note transcription feature seen in the latest WhatsApp beta by WABetaInfo makes me happy. The application will use speech recognition software to listen to what the person on the other end said and convert that into a text transcription. However, most people will find this incredibly useful because it means you can still consume a voice note even when you're in a spot where you can't play audio. It'll also be a major perk for the hearing-impaired, who can now just read what was said instead.
This is great because the transcriptions will be done on the device (though you'll need to download a 150MB package in the app to enable that), and the transcript will be end-to-end encrypted, just like the rest of your messages.
There are a few things I wonder about, though. How many languages will be supported once the feature launches? English will be one, but how many others? On top of that, how well will it cut through background noise in the audio or hear through accents? I suppose that all depends on how good the speech recognition software is, but considering WhatsApp is a Meta product, I'll expect it to be pretty good.
For Some Reason, iOS Users Have Had This Feature For A Pretty Long Time Now
This is great news for us Android users, but the thing is, we're late to the party. Transcribing voice notes has been available to WhatsApp users on iOS for a very long time now. In fact, it showed up in their beta in April 2023, so nearly a year before it showed up in the Android WhatsApp beta now.
While I can't say why it took the people at WhatsApp so long to bring this goodness to us, I am glad it will finally be upon us very soon because it improves the overall experience of using the app.
