On Thursday, WhatsApp revealed that it is introducing voice message transcription. The Meta-owned platform stated that this new feature will be useful when users are on the move or in noisy environments where listening to voice messages isn’t feasible.
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A similar functionality was introduced last year for Apple’s Messages app, another key competitor of WhatsApp, as part of the iOS 17 software update.
With this feature, voice messages can be converted into text, allowing users to stay engaged in conversations even when they can’t—or prefer not to—listen to voice recordings.
WhatsApp assures that these transcripts are generated locally on the device and remain private.
To enable this feature, users need to navigate to their settings, select “Chats,” then tap “Voice message transcripts” to turn it on and choose their preferred transcript language.
To generate a transcript for a voice message, users can long-press on the message and select the “transcribe” option. The feature won’t automatically transcribe all messages.
WhatsApp plans to roll out this feature globally over the next few weeks, initially supporting select languages.
On iOS, supported languages vary depending on the version: iOS 16+ supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, and Arabic. For iOS 17+, additional languages such as Danish, Finnish, Malay, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, and Thai are included.
For Android users, the supported languages currently include English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. WhatsApp intends to expand language support in the coming months.