WhatsApp is improving voice messages with out of chat playback, pause/resume recording
Today WhatsApp has announced it’s working to bring some big improvements to the way it handles voice messages. If you’re wondering why the focus on voice messages, there’s an easy explanation, as the company revealed that a mind-boggling 7 billion of them are being sent every day on WhatsApp.
We’re now getting support to pausing voice messages and then resume them when they’re ready. There’s also a preview function which allows you to listen before sending it.
The most important improvement is chat playback. This allows you to listen to voice messages outside of the chat you’re part of. You can also multitask, read, and reply to other messages. WhatsApp has finally responded to this request for voice messaging.
There’s also “remember playback” coming, which seems incredibly useful too: this basically lets you pick up where you left off when you return to the chat if you pause a voice message you were listening to.
Then there’s fast playback for forwarded messages, another self-explanatory feature that’s been long overdue (since you could already play at 1. 5x or 2x on ‘normal’ messages, but not forwarded ones).
A waveform visualization, which shows a visual representation the audio from the voice messages “to assist with the recording”, was also unveiled by WhatsApp.
Aside from this, all the other features mentioned above will roll out “in the coming weeks”.