When you are busy at work or in a meeting, receiving a voice note from a friend on WhatsApp can be quite disruptive and often puts you in a difficult situation. You want to know what is written in the voice note but can’t listen to it in the middle of the meeting. Almost all of us have been in such situations, but did you know? WhatsApp is working on a fix for this. According to a recent report by WA Beta Info, WhatsApp has started rolling out a feature that will let you convert voice notes to text, allowing you to read their contents without playing them out loud. The feature is currently being tested with a small group of beta users in some countries who have downloaded the latest WhatsApp beta for Android update from the Google Play Store.

Users who have access to this feature can enable it for both incoming and outgoing voice messages by downloading a language data package. This ensures that voice notes remain private, as the transcription process takes place locally on the user’s device. Currently, supported languages ​​include English, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Hindi, with more languages ​​expected in the future.

For people with hearing impairments, this feature greatly improves accessibility, allowing them to participate in conversations with voice notes. It also provides convenience to users by allowing them to quickly scan their transcriptions instead of listening to long voice messages, making it easier to understand the content.

According to WA Beta Info, users will be asked to download around 150MB of additional app data. The feature will be enabled by default, but in some cases, users may have to enable it. According to the screenshot shared by the publication, upon enabling the transcription feature, users will get a notification asking them to “Read voice messages with transcript”, indicating the availability of the content of the transcribed message.

The report also states that the transcripts are generated on the device itself, which means no one else can listen to the voice notes or read the users’ transcripts. So, it seems that WhatsApp has also focused on users’ privacy while rolling out the new feature.

The report also states that the feature is currently in the testing phase and is available to a limited number of beta users. However, WhatsApp aims to roll out the feature to more users soon.