Snapchat invented the idea of posting brief “stories,” photos, videos, and text posts that automatically disappear after a day. Instagram eventually copied the idea, and every other app under the sun followed suit. Particularly Meta made it a point to include Stories on WhatsApp in addition to Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms where we already get something very similar in the form of that app’s “status” updates.
You can currently post images, videos, GIFs, and text messages to your status, but voice notes may soon become an entirely new alternative. Evidence found by WABetaInfo suggests that this new feature would enable users to record and upload voice messages to their WhatsApp status. Once the feature is available, we assume the app will allow you to record a voice note similar to how you can do it in a chat.
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Since you can send existing audio files as messages in WhatsApp chats, this may include uploading them, though we haven’t seen any proof. The same privacy settings you use for photos and videos will be used to share voice recordings in status updates with your WhatsApp contacts, and just like those, voice notes will be end-to-end encrypted.
WhatsApp isn’t the only app experimenting with voice posts. Twitter has been testing the ability to send voice tweets on iOS for some time, but the feature has yet to be made available to everyone. However, in the case of WhatsApp, it appears to be a natural extension of the status option — the app already supports voice messages. It has done so for several years, so why not allow people to post them in their status?
Unfortunately, this feature is still under development and not at all usable yet, not even for beta testers. When it does, however, it will probably start with the beta users of the app before rolling it out to everyone else.