Google Messages will transcribe voice messages in the future

Do you want to say a lot but don’t feel like typing at all? Then you probably send a voice message. But what if someone who can’t listen? Google Messages will soon expand its transcribing capabilities to Messages.

Voice messages

Voice messages are useful if you need to convey a long message that you don’t want to type, but also if you want to convey the right tone to avoid misunderstandings.

While it has its uses, it can also be annoying because sometimes your receiver is in a place where it is not convenient to listen to voice messages and does not carry earplugs. That means he or she has to wait before he or she can hear the content. The good news is that using Google Messages can be fixed in a future update.

Google Messages

As noted by 9to5Google in its APK teardown, Google is working on an update to Google Messages where users will be given the option to transcribe voice messages they have received into text, allowing users to see their voice messages instead of listening to them.

While we haven’t been able to test the feature ourselves to see how well it actually works, 9to5Google notes that it seems to work quite well so far. The system even understands where to place punctuation, although that is now mainly true for English. Whether this also applies to Dutch is unknown. Of course, other factors can affect accuracy, such as the quality of the voice message, so if it’s sent somewhere where there’s a lot of noise, it can be more difficult to transcribe.

Anyway, it sounds like it could be a useful feature, although that will be for English initially. On the other hand, Google’s transcribing app also works quite well in Dutch, so maybe it’s not too bad how fast the rollout is in other languages.