WhatsApp gets better voice messages

The WhatsApp announced on Wednesday They will be rolling out some improvements to voice messages over the coming weeks, including the ability to listen to a message while reading other chats and playback of messages 1.5 or twice as fast (yes, please, put this feature on). Everywhere).

The message logging experience is also improving. WhatsApp now allows you to pause and resume recording, so you don’t have to leave huge gaps of silence if you’re thinking about what to say next or re-record if you need to have a short conversation in real life. You’ll also be able to listen to a message before sending it to make sure you don’t accidentally cut it out or include something you don’t want.

There is also a slight aesthetic improvement. Instead of just using a font to show the progress of playing your voice messages, WhatsApp will now use a waveform for the actual message. Plus, WhatsApp can remember where you were when you paused playback and let you start playing from that point again so you don’t have to re-listen to an entire message.

These improvements are likely to get a lot of use – WhatsApp says users send an average of 7 billion voice chats day. While some similar features have already been available in other apps (Telegram, for example, lets you listen to messages outside of chats for a while), it’s definitely nice to see the WhatsApp version get some attention.