WhatsApp updated the video calling experience across devices on Thursday by introducing screen sharing with audio support and a new speaker spotlight feature. It's also going to hike the limit of participants in a video call to up to 32 people.

WhatsApp had last year introduced screen-sharing support for video calls in August. Now, it enhances that experience by allowing the support to share audio along with your screen. This should let you watch videos along with your contacts on a WhatsApp call.

In addition to the expanded limit, another important update that WhatsApp has adopted in video calling is the expansion of the limit where as many as 32 people can have a single video call across devices. Previously, the limit in mobile was 32 participants. While the limit for windows and macOS users could add up to 16 and eight respectively.

Such is in line with what Apple's FaceTime offers to its iPhone and iPad users to accommodate up to 32 participants during video calls. Google Meet and Zoom support up to 100 people even on the basic tier.

The latest set of updates from WhatsApp also boasts the speaker light, an auto-attendant that automatically draws attention to the speaker participant of a video call and moves them forward to the front of the screen.

Meta, parent of WhatsApp, has also launched the Meta Low Bitrate, or MLow, codec on WhatsApp in a bid to improve call reliability even when the user has bad network connectivity or is using an older device. It is an important upgrade to the already existing open-source codec Opus, which Meta had already rolled out across its real-time communication products. The proprietary codec is rated to deliver twice the audio quality of Opus even while keeping 10% lower computational complexity than that of the open source codec.

According to a blog post, WhatsApp said the company is rolling out all of the latest calling-related updates, except MLow, to all eligible users over the next few weeks.

MLow is already available on Instagram and Messenger calls and has now started rolling out on WhatsApp in a bid to improve the calling experience across Meta platforms.