According to an announcement by the firm Meta on Monday, WhatsApp will soon begin rolling out a new audio chat function for large groups, similar to Discord. The new process is intended to be less intrusive than a group call, which rings each group member. Voice conversations may be initiated discretely and without ringing by tapping a bubble within the conversation to join in on the chat.
You can discuss topics with whoever is able, and at the same time, you can text people who cannot join. By clicking on the call controls located at the very top of the audio chat, you can instantly unmute, hang up, or message the group without having to leave the voice chat.
The business will begin rolling out audio conversations to large groups worldwide over the next few weeks, starting with groups with 33 people or more. WhatsApp emphasizes that it automatically encrypts audio chats from beginning to end for further security.
Voice conversations on WhatsApp perform much the same as comparable capabilities on Discord, Telegram, and Slack, enabling large groups of users to engage with one another through a conversation.
Since WABetaInfo announced in August that WhatsApp was testing audio conversations in beta, the debut of the new feature does not come as much of a surprise as you may think it would.
WhatsApp’s statement today comes after the company has spent the previous several months introducing many new capabilities to its platform. The company recently allowed customers to log into two different accounts simultaneously. It recently announced support for passkeys on Android as well as a new capability called “Flows,” which is designed to improve the whole shopping experience by enabling users to do things within the app, such as choose their seat on a flight or schedule an appointment without having to exit the app.
Additionally, the launch takes place a few weeks after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s third-quarter results call that consumers and companies are engaging more than 600 million times daily across all of Meta’s platforms. According to Zuckerberg, income from the family of applications and other sources was $293 million in the third quarter of 2018, representing a year-over-year increase of 53%. The WhatsApp Business platform mostly drove this increase.
