In a blog post this week, WhatsApp said the feature was prevalent, with users sending an average of 7 billion voice messages per day.
“Voice messages have made it quick and easy for people to have more expressive conversations,” WhatsApp stated.
“Showing emotion or excitement through voice is more natural than text, and in many situations, voice messages are the preferred form of communication on WhatsApp.”
Many of the features were previously available to users in the Android and iOS beta programmes.
The first new capability is out-of-chat playback, which lets users listen to a voice message outside of a chat.
Related: WhatsApp now allows to send messages and disappear after 7 days.
That enables them to multitask or read and respond to other messages within WhatsApp.
Other valuable additions are the ability to listen to a draft preview of your voice message before sending and pausing and resuming a voice message in case you’re interrupted while recording.
The remaining features are as follows:
WhatsApp said the new features would be rolled out to everyone on WhatsApp in the coming weeks.
It advised users to check their app stores for updates to ensure they are running the latest build.
Bigger file sending limit
That enables them to multitask or read and respond to other messages within WhatsApp.
Other valuable additions are the ability to listen to a draft preview of your voice message before sending and pausing and resuming a voice message in case you’re interrupted while recording.
The remaining features are as follows:
- Waveform Visualization: Shows a visual representation of the sound on the voice message to help follow the recording.
- Remember Playback: If you pause when listening to a voice message, you can pick up where you left off when returning to the chat.
- Fast Playback on Forwarded Messages: Play voice messages at 1.5x or 2x speeds to listen to messages faster on both regular and forwarded messages.
WhatsApp said the new features would be rolled out to everyone on WhatsApp in the coming weeks.
It advised users to check their app stores for updates to ensure they are running the latest build.
Bigger file sending limit
WABetaInfo has also reported good news for users frustrated by WhatsApp’s file size limits.
The company runs a small test in Argentina that allows beta users to send media files up to 2GB.
In the official versions of the app, WhatsApp currently limits the size of files to 100MB when using the document option.
Media professionals have used this workaround to send photos and videos to avoid WhatsApp’s aggressive compression algorithms, which cause a significant reduction in quality to keep file sizes small.
WABetaInfo said it was unclear whether WhatsApp would be rolling out the increase to 2GB to more users, particularly given that the test is limited to a small subset of users.
