Mobile messaging service WhatsApp has been steadily growing in popularity and just recently announced it broke past 300 million monthly active users. To accompany such momentuous achievement the company is also revamping the way voice messaging works on its app across all five supported platforms.
WhatsApp has supported audio attachments for a while now, but now this is fully integrated as a push-to-talk feature, allowing users to record and send voice memos with the tap of a button without ever leaving the chat screen. Users on the other end can play them back from within the app without opening a media player.
The mic icon accompanying voice messages will turn blue whenever recipients have listened to it, and since you never leave the chat screen, users on the other end will be able to reply with voice, text, photo or videos without switching modes. Messages are played back by tapping on them and WhatsApp will send the audio either though you phone's ear piece if you hold it to your head, or through the speaker if holding it away.
Last but not least, WhatsApp has also removed the audio recording length limitations. The company told Engadget that it has "spent a lot of time refining [voice messaging] and made it really simple to use."
WhatsApp just keeps getting bigger and shows no signs of slowing. The company has reported that its users currently send 31 billion messages per day, a number steadily rising from the 27 billion reported back in June. In comparison to the up and coming Snapchat that pushes 200 million photo messages per day, WhatsApp's users send about 325 million of them, though admittedly photo sharing is fundamentally different on both services.
The new voice memos will be available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BB10 and Symbian.
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