Facebook Messenger Voice Transcription Trial Begins

Social networking giant, Facebook, has begun trialling a new feature for the highly criticised Messenger app; voice transcription. As you may or may not be aware, Facebook Messenger can send and receive voice clips. Sometime you can get inundated with these and just not not been able to play them because you are in a business meeting or maybe you are always up to your eyeballs in work?

Facebook is well aware of the situation and have taken measures to rectify maters with the new voice transcription feature. Head of Facebook’s Messenger team, David Marcus, recently announced on Facebook that the social network is currently in the process of trialling the new feature with a small number of Facebook Messenger users, to see what they think about it.

The service works basically like this: When a friend sends you a voice clip, the software will make a note of the the audio in text form, in order for you to easily read it without actually having to listen to it. The feature is a good idea, which offers recipients a rapid way to catch up on voice messages without having to make excuses in the middle of a business meetings or appear rude to others by plugging earphones in.

Marcus said recently, “Today we are starting to roll out a small test that helps people read the voice clips they receive instead of having to play them out loud…Our plan is to test this feature at a tiny scale for now and we’re looking forward to seeing what you think of it.”

Facebook has said that voice transcription will be an automatically turned feature, however the service can easily be disabled via the settings if users do not the feature for some reason.

This trial stage has only just started, so please don’t think that you are definitely going to receive the new feature soon. If Facebook does receive good responses during the testing period, then the service should be rolled out to the the iOS, Windows Phone and Android versions of the app, but we will have to wait and see.

[Image via lifehacker]

SOURCE: http://www.t3.com/news/facebook-kicks-off-voice-transcription-trials-in-messenger