WhatsApp testing voice transcriptions for audio messages on iOS

The feature is being developed for iOS as of now

WhatsApp is working on enabling voice transcriptions for audio messages on iOS, according to WABetainfo.

I've reached 100k followers some hours ago. To celebrate this event, I've published an article about voice message transcription, the next WhatsApp feature available in a future update.

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Other changes about #WhatsApp will be announced here soon. Thanks again #100khttps://t.co/3vEPgwfmsNpic.twitter.com/e2cv3Rpi0v — WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) September 11, 2021

The publication says that your voice messages won't be sent to Facebook or WhatsApp servers for transcriptions, instead it will rely on Apple to do it for them. The catch here is that it will help Apple improve its speech recognition technology and the messages won't be linked to your identity.

You will need to provide permission to WhatsApp to use Apple's Speech Recognition service. Once granted, you can then open a dedicated transcription section that will even allow you to jump between various timestamps in the voice message and view a transcription.

Currently, there is no word on when this feature will be available for Android. This makes sense as WhatsApp is tying into an Apple service to provide the facility.

It remains to be seen whether WhatsApp will use a similar deal with Google or something else entirely. Google already does this using Google Recorder but that's tied down with exclusivity on Pixel phones. A third party solution like Otter.ai could be used but that will likely bring its own set of problems.

Either way, it will be interesting to see how WhatsApp brings this to Android.