How to Use WhatsApp’s Voice Message Transcripts
WhatsApp’s voice message transcripts have just become available in Pakistan. The feature lets you convert voice messages into text, which is useful when you can’t listen to a voice message.
However, there are a few limitations to talk about and you need to manually activate this feature. Here is how to use it.
How to Use WhatsApp’s Voice Message Transcripts
The first thing you need to do is activate the feature in the app’s chat settings. Tap the three-dot menu on the top right of the main menu where all your chats are. Head into Settings > Chats > Voice message transcripts. Make sure your WhatsApp is updated to the latest version, else you may not see the WhatsApp voice message transcripts option here.
The screenshots below show where you need to go.
As the screenshots show, the only available languages for transcription are English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. This means that voice messages in Urdu will not be translated just yet, but you can easily use the feature with voice messages in English. We can only hope that WhatsApp will get support for Urdu or even Hindi in the future.
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Once you select a preferred language, it will download a file for that language for transcriptions to work. For instance, the language file for English is around 138 MB. Once your file is downloaded, you are all set to transcribe voice messages in English.
Limitations
As the screenshot shows, the feature can’t understand every voice message, even in English. I only said “helloooooo” in my voice message, but it was still unable to recognize it, meanwhile, the outgoing voice message saying “Hello, how are you?” was recognized just fine. Since the feature is still relatively new, we expect these limitations to be ironed out eventually.
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Make sure to update your WhatsApp to the latest version to use voice message transcripts.