WhatsApp has announced a new set of tools for the Voice Notes feature on its app to make the experience even better than before. While these features were available to beta testers in earlier beta versions, they are now available on the stable channel meaning everyone should now be getting the update via the Play Store or App Store.
Revamped WhatsApp Voice Notes
WhatsApp announced a bunch of new tools such as the Out of Chat Playback where one can listen to a voice message outside of the chat so you can multitask or read and respond to other messages. Next, there’s waveform visualisation of the voice note which shows a visual representation of the sound on the voice message to help follow the recording.
Further, when recording a voice message, you can now pause the recording and resume when ready, in case you’re interrupted. Then there are Draft Previews so you can listen to your voice messages before sending them. Now, WhatsApp also remembers the playback time at which you stopped the voice note. This means that if you pause when listening to a voice message, you can pick up where you left off when you return to the chat.
Lastly, you can now play voice notes at a higher playback speed on WhatsApp. You can play them at 1.5x or 2x speeds to listen to messages faster on both regular and forwarded messages. WhatsApp says that the feature will continue to roll out in the coming weeks. Moreover, WhatsApp also stated that its users send 7 billion voice messages on average everyday, while reiterating that these are protected by end-to-end encryption to keep them private and secure at all times.
Apart from that, WhatsApp has been spotted testing the ability to share media files up to 2GB on iOS. The shared screenshots reveal that WhatsApp is sending alerts to users, informing them about the raised limit for file sharing. As of now, it is not clear as to when the update will be widely available for all iOS and Android users.