According to the latest news, WhatsApp is developing a feature to offer transcriptions of received voice messages. It will let users easily read the voice msg without having to play it out loud. The feature was first spotted by WABetaInfo. It is currently being developed for iOS. As of now, it is not clear when it will be available for iPhones and when it will come in Android.
According to a screenshot shared by WABetaInfo, the feature works by sending speech data to Apple “to process your requests”. It is to be noted that it does not send data to the parent company Facebook. There is a disclaimer that says this data “will also help Apple improve its speech recognition technology.” Technically, it is not clear how the data “sent to Apple” will be secured since the feature is not yet official.
Currently, voice messages are protected by WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption.WABetaInfo has reported hat that transcriptions are saved to the device after they are created and that a “Transcript” section makes it easy to skip specific parts of a message. The feature sounds more or less similar to Google’s Recorder or Otter.ai. As of now, transcribing WhatsApp voice messages is possible only through third-party software.
As of now, there is no information about the availability of the feature on WhatsApp’s Android app. Considering data feeds are sent to Apple and not Facebook, making a guess about the Android version of the feature is more difficult.
However, given the level of feature parity between WhatsApp’s different apps, the company might soon be considering the Android version of the feature and attempt to develop it.
