It is one of the most amazing features of WhatsApp and yet it is disabled by default.
Still waiting for message transcriptions to arrive on your mobile? Well, don’t wait any longer, because most likely you already have them but you just don’t have them activated . This happens because converting voice notes to text , one of the most anticipated new features of WhatsApp, is not activated by default.
Activate message transcription now to know what an audio says without having to listen to it and without your audios being sent anywhere for transcription. We also tell you how to use WhatsApp audio transcription.
How to activate WhatsApp audio transcription
You’ve probably heard that WhatsApp was preparing an integrated feature to convert audio messages sent to you into text , without having to listen to them. This new feature is highly anticipated by those who hate WhatsApp audio messages , and was launched last year timidly on iPhones . Now it’s also available on Android, but you have to activate it.
You can easily check if you have audio transcription enabled on your WhatsApp by opening the settings menu, going to the Chats menu and seeing if the Voice message transcriptions setting appears . Follow these steps:
- Open WhatsApp and press the menu button ⋮
- Tap on Settings .
- Enter Chats .
- Turn on the Message Transcripts option .
When you do this, WhatsApp will show you an information window indicating that these transcriptions are made on the mobile itself, so that no one else can listen to the audios. You must press Select language to download the audio recognition package that allows this to happen.
Next comes the time to choose the transcription language , which is the language that will be used to recognize the audios. There are four languages to choose from for now: English, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian and you must choose the one in which you receive the most audios on WhatsApp.
Language packs take up just over 100 MB and need to finish downloading before the new feature is operational and ready to use on your WhatsApp.
How to transcribe audios in WhatsApp
It is just as important to activate the function as it is to know how the audios are transcribed , since it is not something that happens automatically. You must choose to transcribe an audio manually.
To do this, you must long-press the audio to activate the selection mode that will enable the ⋮ menu at the top. This is where you must tap Transcribe . These are the steps to convert WhatsApp audios to text:
- Long tap on the audio to select it.
- Press the menu ⋮
- Tap Transcribe .
- The transcription will take a few seconds.
The translation of an audio appears just below it as a text in quotation marks. Words that you don’t understand appear as dashes, but this new feature still helps a lot to know what a WhatsApp audio is about without having to play it.