WhatsApp announced on Thursday it’s rolling out voice message transcripts. The Meta-owned company says the new feature will come in handy when you’re on the move or in a loud place where you can’t listen to a voice message. A similar feature was announced last year for Apple’s Message app, a top WhatsApp competitor, with the release of Apple’s software update, iOS 17.
With the new feature, voice messages can be transcribed into text to help you keep up with conversations when you’re unable (or perhaps unwilling) to listen to a voice message. WhatsApp claims its transcripts are generated on your device and no one else can read them.
To access the new WhatsApp feature, you need to go into your settings, select the “Chats” section, and then tap “Voice message transcripts” to turn the feature on. From there, you can select your transcript language.
Once you have turned on the feature you can get a transcript for a voice message by long-pressing it and then tapping the “transcribe” option. It will not automatically transcribe every message for you, that is.
Voice message transcripts are rolling out globally over the coming weeks in select languages, the company says.
On iOS, the languages that are supported depend on your OS. If you have iOS 16+, the supported languages include English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, and Arabic. If you have iOS 17+, the supported languages include Danish, Finish, Malay, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, and Thai.
If you have an Android, you can access transcripts in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian.
WhatsApp plans to add support for additional languages in the coming months.