Facebook-owned WhatsApp could offer a transcription feature for voice messages. This feature will allow the app users to transcribe voice recordings to text in just one click. As of now, the feature is being developed for iOS users only and there is no information on when or whether the feature will be available for Android users.
The upcoming feature was first reported by the famous WhatsApp feature tracking website
WABetaInfo. The report added that the new voice transcription feature will help Apple in improving its speech-recognition technology.
How will the feature work?
The report reveals that the feature is optional but will require special permission. WABetaInfo has uploaded some screenshots in its report from which it is quite clear how this feature will work.
As soon as the user will use the voice message transcription feature, WhatsApp will display a notification saying “Speech data from this app will be sent to Apple to process the request. This will also help Apple to improve its speech recognition technology. Transcribe Voice messages: Don’t Allow or OK”.
After the user accepts the notification, he/she will be able to try out the transcription service. A new transcript section will also open up which will allow users to jump to a specific timestamp.
The report says that when the message will be transcribed for the first time, its transcription will be saved locally in the WhatsApp database. This means that there will be no need for the users to transcript it again if they want to see the transcription.
Earlier, the company was considering integrating a third party application for the voice transcription feature. Since the feature is still under development, one can expect it to release for the beta users in months to come, followed by a sable build. It may be released for Android users once it is officially available for all the iOS users.
WhatsApp recently completed building end-to-end backups for chats. This means that no one except the user will be able to access the WhatsApp chats backup.
