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We are spoilt for choice when it comes to how to send and receive a message.

Back in the day, it was just sending an SMS, but now we have a spectrum of options that cater to various different situations, and the options are only increasing.

For those of us who are in a situation where typing a message out is challenging or impossible, we can send a voicenote.

But if the receiver is in no position to listen to a voicenote out loud, has no earphones, or has no time, they could soon be able to make use of something that WhatsApp has been reportedly working on.

WhatsApp’s new feature, currently in development to be released on iOS devices, would let a user read the content quietly by transcribing the received voicenotes.

Not only will this help those of us who don’t particularly want to listen to a long-winded voicenote, but it will also allow us to reference important details later without having to rummage through the audio.

We can already speed up voicenotes by clicking on the 1x, 1,5x or 2x that is alongside the play/pause button on the voicenote.

The Verge reported on a screenshot shared by WABetaInfo, which explains more:

WABetaInfo reports that transcriptions are saved to the device after they’re created, and that a “Transcript” section makes it easy to skip to specific parts of a message.

That’s similar to other auto-transcription software like Google’s Recorder or Otter.ai, which let you click on a word to skip to the moment it’s said in a recording.

Transcribing WhatsApp voice messages is currently only possible using third-party software.

The new feature that could appear on the user’s device upon update would be optional.

Both WhatsApp and Facebook won’t be able to access your messages, apparently, as the speech data is sent to Apple “to process your requests”.

The disclaimer says that the data “will also help Apple improve its speech recognition technology”:

Image: WABetaInfo

Although, how the data “sent to Apple” will be secured is still not totally clear as the feature is yet to be officially announced.

At the moment we know that voicenotes are protected by WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption.

[source:theverge]