WhatsApp is rolling out voice message transcripts, the company said on Thursday. "It is expected to be very handy if you're on the go or in a noisy place and can't listen to a voice message," explains Meta, the company owns WhatsApp. Last year, a similar feature was announced for Apple's Message, an application considered one of WhatsApp's closest competitors, when a new version of Apple's software update, iOS 17, was released.

With the new feature, voice messages may be transcribed into text to help you keep up with conversations when you're unable (or perhaps unwilling) to listen to a voice message. WhatsApp claims its transcripts are generated on your device and no one else can read them.

You will need to go into your settings, choose the "Chats" section, and then tap "Voice message transcripts" to make the feature active. Then you can choose your transcript language.

Once you have activated this feature, you can get a transcript for any voice message by long-pressing it and then tapping the "transcribe" option. It is not going to automatically transcribe everything for you.

The company claims voice message transcripts are rolling out globally over the coming weeks in select languages.

For iOS, supported languages depend on your OS. If you have iOS 16+, that list includes English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, and Arabic. If you have iOS 17+, Danish, Finnish, Malay, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, and Thai are included on the list.

If you have an Android, you'll be able to read transcripts in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian.
Another languages will be supported in coming months.