WhatsApp developers will not be able to transcribe audio to text , after months of working on this novelty. Without a doubt, it would be a useful function, because when transcribing the audio we could read its content in text even when it is not possible to activate the sound.
In general, the technology for transcribing audio to text has come a long way in recent years, so it’s not clear why WhatsApp thought it was a bad idea to incorporate it into its mobile app.
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WhatsApp had been working since September 2021 on transcribing the audios, but in the end the project was abandoned , without the exact reasons being revealed.
The source of this leak is very reliable, since it comes from WABetaInfo, an account that has already revealed many firsts about WhatsApp on Twitter. In fact, he was the one who discovered the references to transcription in the app code, and showed images of how it would work.
At first, when transcribing the audio to text , Apple’s technology was used natively integrated into the iPhone , and it is to be imagined that on Android they would also use Google’s own system.
We can only speculate why development has stopped, but using third-party transcription may have caused issues between WhatsApp, Google, and Apple. In principle, it has been implemented to improve the accessibility of the system for people with hearing difficulties.
If it were integrated into WhatsApp, it would receive millions of daily requests from people who simply do not like to listen to audio, or who do not have headphones at hand or cannot activate the sound of their mobile where they are.
We have explained how to convert WhatsApp audio to text, something that makes sense if we receive a very long voice note whose content we want to work on later. Unfortunately, it is not a very comfortable system for day-to-day use, as the integrated transcription will be.
We hope that the transcription of audio to text on WhatsApp will resume at some point , but for now it is stopped, and we should not expect it to be launched in the short or medium term.
