WhatsApp Prepares Transcriptions for Voice Messages

Let’s be honest: a lot of voice messages out there are hard to understand, although the ones sending them are apparently speaking in the same language as you. That’s why WhatsApp prepares a new interesting functionality for some of its over 2 billion users.

According to WABetaInfo, the world’s most used instant messaging app is working on a transcription feature for voice messages. During a future update, Apple will lend WhatsApp a hand to make the transcription possible. The messages won’t be sent to servers of WhatsApp or Facebook to get the transcription. Apple will use the transcriptions to improve speech recognition ability.

An optional feature

There’s no use worrying, as the feature will only be optional. When you want to transcribe a message, you will be prompted with the following message, as quoted by WABetaInfo:

’WhatsApp’ Would Like to Access Speech Recognition. Speech data from this app will be sent to Apple to process your requests. This will also help Apple improve its speech recognition technology. Transcribe voice messages.

The Facebook-owned app even prepares encrypted backups for users. This means that they’ll get to encrypt the backups of discussions that are sent to either Google Drive or the iCloud from Apple.
Mark Zuckerberg, who is the CEO of Facebook, said as quoted by The Verge:

WhatsApp is the first global messaging service at this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups, and getting there was a really hard technical challenge that required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage across operating systems.

All we have to do now is wait for the upcoming update of WhatsApp to see the transcription feature at work. However, we can only expect it to be received very well, as WhatsApp users are generally satisfied by the app.