WhatsApp just got a long-awaited messaging feature, how to activate it

WhatsApp just received a long-awaited messaging transcription feature. By the way, Apple introduced a similar feature with iOS 17 at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, so it’s nice to see WhatsApp closing the gap.

The company touts this new feature as being useful on the go or in a noisy location where it’s not possible to listen to recorded voice messages. WhatsApp also says that transcriptions are generated on a person’s device, so no one else, not even WhatsApp, can hear or read their personal messages. To give users greater peace of mind about the security of their conversations, WhatsApp earlier this year added a visual confirmation confirming that the chat is indeed encrypted via the Signal protocol.

In order to enable the new feature, users will need to navigate to Settings > Chats > Voicemail Transcriptions. Once there, the feature can be turned on or off, while also selecting the language in which to transcribe messages. Once enabled, users can transcribe a voice message by long-pressing the message and tapping “transcribe”.

WhatsApp adds that the voice message transcription may take some time to become available. If someone receives a “Transcript not available” error message, it could be due to:

• Users’ transcription language setting does not match the voice message language.
• Some words are not recognized, probably due to background noise.
• Voice message language is not supported. According to WhatsApp, the currently supported languages ​​are English, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian.

It’s important to note that the feature is not 100% accurate, according to WhatsApp. So if something seems strange, it might be worth going back to the message later and listening to it to be sure of what was actually said.

The new transcriptions feature will be rolling out globally over the coming weeks, with a few select languages ​​to start. WhatsApp says it plans to add more languages ​​in the coming months.