14 DAY TRIAL // WhatsApp is working on many, many improvements for its mobile app, and according to a report, a new voice message transcription feature is one of them.
More specifically, the Facebook-owned company wants to provide users with the option of skipping the listening of an audio message and instead, read a transcription generated automatically by the app.
Audio messages are becoming more and more common on WhatsApp, and the parent company believes that allowing users to simply read the text instead of listening to an audio file, which obviously doesn’t come in handy since you need to use your phone speakers, is the right way to go.
And indeed, such capabilities would be useful in a wide variety of scenarios, including in those places where you just can’t play something through your phone’s speakers.
Transcription carried out on the phone
Needless to say, to be able to create a transcription of an audio message, a speech recognition system needs to access the file.
But Facebook and WhatsApp wouldn’t be the one to access it, as the whole thing would rely on Apple’s speech recognition system (on iPhone), with the whole data to then be stored locally, allowing you to access the text at a later time as well if you want to.
“Speech data from this app will be sent to Apple to process your requests. This will also help Apple improve its speech recognition technology,” a message showing up on the device before using the transcription feature the first time reads.
For the time being, however, this new feature is still in the works, and there’s no ETA as to when it could go live for production devices. WABetaInfo says it’s currently available only on iPhone, but there’s obviously a very good chance Android devices would get similar capabilities too.