WhatsApp voice transcriptions are finally available on Android

WhatsApp hasn’t had the best month of November when it comes to bugs and issues within the app. Two weeks ago, we made sure everyone knew that the latest beta had a major green screen issue. Regardless, WhatsApp is one of the most-used messaging apps in the world, and it will continue to be one of them for the foreseeable future. It might not always be first to the punch when it comes to debuting new features, nor does WhatsApp do the best job at bringing its app across multiple platforms in line with each other, but its developers usually put in the time to refine them without too many bugs (recent months notwithstanding). Today, it finally debuted a feature that was previously iOS-only to its Android app.

After almost two years of waiting, WhatsApp is finally adding voice message transcripts to its Android app. Instead of having to listen to minutes upon minutes of voice messages, users can now read voice-to-text versions of them. It works almost exactly like Google Messages’ voice message transcription tool that came out in 2022, and to enable it, users can go into Settings and then Chats, then turn on Voice message transcripts. It will be rolling onto the app globally over the next few weeks for English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian speakers, while more languages will be added soon.

Beating WhatsApp to the transcription punch

Transcribing voices into text is not a new thing on Android devices, and even though it’s not one of the dealbreakers when it comes to a messaging app, it’s a “nice to have” tool that WhatsApp has in its feature set that Google Messages already has. For people with Google Pixel phones, they’ve got perhaps the best transcription tool across all Android devices for recorded voices. Google Recorder transcribes voices accurately and can differentiate between different speakers, making it the quintessential tool for journalists and students on the platform.

There are other useful transcription apps across the Google ecosphere, especially for those who have difficulty hearing or people that don’t speak the same language. Google Live Transcribe makes it extremely easy to transcribe speech in real-time, and it’s available on Google Play for most Android smartphones and tablets (it’s preinstalled on Pixel phones). Google Translate can help you transcribe and translate speech, and when paired with a foldable phone, having a two-way conversation with someone who speaks a different language than you is almost too easy.