WhatsApp announced on Tuesday the rollout of an ability to let you preview your voice messages before sending them to your contacts. The update essentially helps you listen to your voice message and see if the audio is good for sharing via the instant messaging app. If not, you can delete your voice message and record it again for sharing. The voice message preview feature on WhatsApp works with both individual and group chats. It has also been released for all platforms, including Android and iOS, as well as web and desktop.
To use the voice message preview feature on your mobile device, you need to touch the microphone button in a WhatsApp chat and slide it up to lock hands-free recording. This brings up an interface with a stop button and a trash can. You can tap the stop button and then press the play button to listen to your voice message before sharing it with the recipient. WhatsApp also allows you to go to a specific part of the audio by tapping the search bar.
If you don’t think the message is suitable for sending, you can delete it by tapping the trash can. You can also send it by pressing the send button.
The addition of the preview feature will be very useful if you prefer to send voice messages rather than their text version on WhatsApp. This allows you to preview the draft of your voice message before sending it to your contacts. However, you can still accidentally send random voice messages if you just touch the microphone button on the app and don’t slide it up to lock the recording function.
WhatsApp confirmed to Gadgets 360 that the preview feature has been rolled out to all users. We were also able to use it in the latest version of the app on a list of Android and iOS devices and on the web.
In May, WhatsApp was spotted developing its voice message preview feature. It was initially seen with devotees Rating and Cancel buttons, as reported by WhatsApp beta tracker WABetaInfo. However, the meta company has preferred to use the traditional play and trash buttons over text references.
It is important to note that while the latest update allows users to preview voice messages before sending them to their contacts, it does not allow to pause recordings of voice messages. This means that you cannot pause the audio recording of your message and resume it after some time.
Still, WhatsApp seems to have that feature in the works as well. WABetaInfo saw the option to pause voice messages in October. However, it is not yet available to end users.
WhatsApp has shown an active interest in improving the voice messaging experience on its platform in recent months. The app recently introduced the playback speed and waveforms for voice messages. Test features were also spotted, including a global voice messaging player and voice message transcription.