WHATSAPP has made it much easier to hold a conversation through voice notes – even when you’re in a noisy environment.
Voice notes, the little vocal messages you can ping to friends and family instead of a text or a call, are a brilliant way to liven up a conversation.
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But they can be frustrating to receive if you’re in a loud environment.
Or perhaps even more annoying when you’re in a really quiet room, where you don’t feel like playing half your conversation out loud.
The Meta-owned messenger, used by roughly 2billion people worldwide, has tried to ease this pain.
It has introduced a transcription feature that spells out exactly what the audio message says.
Once you long-press a voice note, a transcription will be tucked underneath that you can read instead of listen to.
While security buffs may raise their eyebrows at this, in true WhatsApp fashion, the voice notes are end-to-end encrypted.
This means that even though WhatsApp is transcribing the voice note – the company cannot actually hear or read the contents of the message.
Nor can anyone else for that matter, not even hackers or police.
“Voice message transcripts are generated on your device, and your personal voice messages remain protected by end-to-end encryption,” the company writes in a new help page for the tool.
Transcripts are rolling out to users globally over the coming weeks, on both Android and iOS, according to WhatsApp.
The feature can be opted into, so if you find a written detail of each voice note you receive annoying – you can turn it off.
To use it, first you’ll have to make sure you’re using the most up-to-date version of WhatsApp there is.
Then open the messenger, head to Settings > Chats > Voice message transcripts to turn transcriptions on or off.
Here you can also select your transcript language.
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