WhatsApp testing voice-to transcription on iOS
15 Sep 2021
Exclusive WhatsApp news source WABetaInfo has announced that the app may be testing a new voice-to-transcription feature on its iOS devices. While the feature of voice to typing exists in most applications and via keyboard on smartphones, this feature is slightly different. It will attempt to transcribe and provide the "text" version of typically long ramblings sent via voice message.
It was previously believed that in order to carry out this transcription, the voice message would have to be rerouted to WhatsApp's central command, Facebook's servers. According to WABetaInfo however, this journey may not be necessary as the transcription is said to be undertaken by Apple iOS's speech recognition technology. It is believed that this will also help improve Apple's speech recognition technology.
The new feature will reportedly be available for beta testers as soon as the very next update. Although there has yet been no news on the feature and how it will be incorporated when it comes to Android phones, experts such as WABetaInfo have speculated that it will be carried out via Google's text-to-speech features.
The screengrabs of this new feature as shared by WABetaInfo shows that after users grant speech data permissions to Apple, messages can be transcribed and read, with timestamps included.
Source: WABetaInfo