Image: © Sara Michilin/Stock.adobe.com
The company has said that transcripts will be rolled out globally over the coming weeks, with different languages supported depending on your operating system.
WhatsApp announced yesterday (21 November) that it will roll out a speech-to-text transcription feature for voice messages over the coming weeks.
The company, which is owned by Meta, claimed that transcripts are created on the user’s device, which means that no one else, not even WhatsApp, can hear or read the user’s personal messages.
Languages currently supported by the new service on Android are English, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. On iOS 16, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese and Arabic are supported. On iOS 17, Danish, Finish, Hebrew, Malay, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish and Thai are also supported.
“To get started, go to Settings, then Chats, then Voice message transcripts to easily turn transcriptions on or off and select your transcript language,” WhatsApp explained. “You can transcribe a voice message by long pressing on the message and tapping on Transcribe.”
The company said it will continue to build on the feature and make it better.
Transcription is fast becoming a staple of communications technology. However, accuracy still proves to be an issue for many apps.
In the case of one artificial intelligence (AI) transcription tool called Whisper, which was developed by OpenAI and is often used by health systems and clinicians, researchers found it occasionally produced inaccurate transcriptions.
Last year, Apple brought a similar transcription feature to its Message app, which is a notable competitor to WhatsApp. And back in March, Apple said that its podcast app will now include auto-generated transcripts for episodes shortly after they are published.
Meta made headlines last week when it emerged that the company would have to face an antitrust lawsuit filed by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The lawsuit accuses the company of holding a monopoly in the social media networking space through the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.
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