Voice messages are one of the most popular ways for people to chat these days, and WhatsApp is one of the absolute biggest chat apps out there. So it’s somewhat surprising that it’s taken 9 years for the company to improve the feature.
But improve it they have, with six voice-related changes coming soon to a WhatsApp near you. According to a press release, those changes include:
Out of Chat Playback: Listen to a voice message outside of the chat so you can multitask or read and respond to other messages.
Pause/Resume Recording: When recording a voice message, you can now pause the recording and resume when ready, in case you’re interrupted or need to gather your thoughts.
Waveform Visualization: Shows a visual representation of the sound on the voice message to help follow the recording.
Draft Preview: Listen to your voice messages before sending them.
Remember Playback: If you pause when listening to a voice message, you can pick up where you left off when you return to the chat.
Fast Playback on Forwarded Messages: Play voice messages at 1.5x or 2x speeds to listen to messages faster on both regular and forwarded messages.
The above features will address common points of irritation for users, like when you’re interrupted 45 seconds into a 60-second recording but have to start it again from the beginning to catch up.
Considering WhatsApp’s user base sends an unbelievable 7 billion voice messages every day, we’re glad to see some of its glaring issues are finally being dealt with.
WhatsApp says these new features will “roll out in the coming weeks,” so stay tuned for an update!
Further reading: why millions of users ditched WhatsApp a year ago, and why we still rated it the best messaging app of the year