Whatsapp has been rolling out quite a few updates lately and the latest addition is the new in-built speech-to-text feature. This feature lets you dictate your message to the phone so you don’t have to do manual typing. Whatsapp is rolling out this feature for both Android and iOS devices.
Using Google keyboard or any third-party app, the text-to-speech feature doesn’t work very effectively. In order to solve this issue, Whatsapp is integrating the feature in the app itself so users can go hands-free without having to rely on a third-party app.
This update is rolling out in phases which means a few people will receive this feature before its full-fledged application on the app. For those users who have received this feature will find a mic icon on the top right of the keyboard, by clicking this icon users can dictate their messages to the phone. For iOS devices, this feature is present at the bottom right of the keyboard.
The feature is designed to give users easy to use the chatting app. It works very much like Siri dictation of iOS devices. The feature will come in handy if a user has his hands occupied or just does not want to go through the trouble of typing long messages. Although you have to manually click the send button once the message is transcribed, so it is not a completely hands-free feature in the end.
Besides that, the text-to-speech feature does not seem to understand commands like comma and full stop, for those of us who are a bit of grammar nazi, this can be an issue.
For short messages, this application does not hold up that prominence. However, for long messages, the feature can come in handy.
The feature is rolling out in phases, as we mentioned earlier, so it might take some time to reach your phones.
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