As easy to send as they are a nightmare to listen to, long voice messages are the bane of many WhatsApp users. Thankfully, Meta's chat app has been working on a way to make listening to them less daunting.
WhatsApp's new voice message transcription feature is rolling out globally on Android and iOS, allowing you to turn any voice message (no matter how long) into a text that you can read (or quickly skim - nobody will know).
On iPhones (from iOS 16) and Android phones, the new feature can already be used in multiple languages if the latest app version is installed, and is likely to also help in situations where you can't turn on audio or use headphones.
To set up the new feature, you need to turn transcriptions on under Settings > Chats > Voice message transcripts. Here you can also set the preferred language for the conversion. You can then decide on a case-by-case basis whether to transcribe or not.
To see a transcription, you hold down the voice message until the "Transcribe" button appears which you then tap. It can then take a moment before the text of the voice message is ready.
Meta says nobody else, including anybody at WhatsApp, will be able to read your transcript, since it is generated on your device.
The new transcription feature ultimately opens up the possibility for smartphone assistants to interpret and summarize a voice message for you before you listen to it. A two-minute voice message from a friend could then be summarized as something like: "WhatsApp voice message: Rachel says she's running late."
However even though WhatsApp's new transcriptions rely in part on the phone's voice assistant software, there is no indication yet of WhatsApp collaborating with Google and Apple for AI-powered message summaries.
As it stands, the transcriptions are still prone to error, WhatsApp warns. If a "transcript unavailable" error is displayed, this may be because the language setting for the transcriptions does not correspond to the language of the voice message.
However, it may also be because the language of the voice message is not supported. The conversion may also fail due to background noise in the message. And even when you get a transcription, some words and phrases can still simply be wrong.
While the new feature is available on both iOS and Android, Apple's platform currently supports far more languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, and Arabic on iOS 16+; additionally Danish, Finnish, Hebrew, Malay, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish and Thai on iOS 17+). Android supports English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian.