WhatsApp announced on Thursday that it is introducing a new feature that allows you to get written text from voice messages. The company, which is owned by Meta, believes this will be especially useful for people who are busy or in noisy places where it’s difficult to listen to audio messages. This new feature is similar to one that Apple launched last year for its Messages app, which is one of WhatsApp’s main competitors, as part of an update called iOS 17.
With this new feature, if someone sends you a voice message, you can have it turned into text. This means you can read what was said instead of having to listen to it, making it easier to keep up with conversations when you don’t want to—or can’t—listen to the audio. WhatsApp assures users that these written transcripts are created on your own device and that no one else can access or read them.
To start using this feature, you’ll need to change some settings in the WhatsApp app. First, go to your settings, find the section labeled “Chats,” and then turn on “Voice message transcripts.” You can also choose which language you want the transcripts to be in.
Once you have enabled the feature, if you receive a voice message and want it to be transcribed, you just need to press and hold the message and then select the “transcribe” option. Keep in mind, though, this won’t happen automatically for every voice message; you’ll need to initiate the transcription for each one.
WhatsApp says that this new ability to convert voice messages into text will gradually roll out to users all around the world in the coming weeks and will support several languages.
For users with iPhones running iOS 16 or higher, the transcription feature supports languages such as English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, and Arabic. If you’re on iOS 17 or above, it also supports Danish, Finnish, Malay, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, and Thai.
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Android users will be able to access the feature in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian.
Lastly, WhatsApp is planning to add support for more languages in the months ahead, so even more users will be able to benefit from this convenient feature.
