I love WhatsApp but I’ve never been fond of voice messages, leaving them or retrieving them. Now, WhatsApp has revealed an update which will overcome at least the second problem: voice message transcripts.

I get self-conscious as I leave a voice message, thinking about how the words will sound. So, I mostly dictate messages so the phone transcribes it and I send it as a regular message.

And when I see a voice message waiting for me, I slightly dread it. If I’m in a noisy environment, I may not hear it well. If I’m in a quiet place, everyone else will be bothered by it, perhaps.

So, this is a great solution. It’s been in beta for a while now, but WhatsApp has just announced that it’s rolling the feature out globally right now, which will take a few weeks.

It’s starting with just a few languages, WhatsApp says, and these turn out to be English, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian, with more languages to be supported in the future.

The company has stressed that the transcriptions are done without sacrificing privacy, saying, “Voice message transcripts are generated on your device, and your personal voice messages remain protected by end-to-end encryption. No one, including WhatsApp, can listen to your voice messages or see the content of your voice message transcripts.”

You need to set it up, please note. Here’s how.

Within WhatsApp, go to Settings, then Chats and choose Voice message transcripts. Here you can turn transcriptions on or off and select your transcript language. WhatsApp says, “You can transcribe a voice message by long pressing on the message and tapping on ‘transcribe’.”

This is the best of both worlds. You get to hear the voice of the person leaving the message, which has a special intimacy, but you can also choose to just read rather than listen.

This is useful not just for noisy situations or other inappropriate environments, it means that if you get yet another really long voice message from your eternally long-winded friend, relative or boss that you can save yourself time by reading instead of listening.

Forbes