On Friday David Marcus, the company's VP of Messaging Products, announced the feature through a Facebook post saying that the company has started rolling out the feature to select Facebook Messenger accounts for testing purposes. With the feature, both the sender and the receiver will see an "Auto-created" text preview of the voice messages sent in Facebook Messenger.
"We're always working on ways to make Messenger more useful. As many of you know, we already offer a feature that enables people to send voice clips to their friends without having to type out the text. 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. So, for example, if you're at a concert or in a meeting, and would prefer to read a voice clip from a friend, you now can if you're part of the small test we're rolling out. 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 before making the experience more widely available," noted Marcus on its Facebook post along with an image of the feature (see above).
It seems that the company wants to make sure that the voice transcription feature works perfectly fine before it gets rolled out to everyone, as speech-recognition can be a disaster some times, and famously also has problems with different accents. This may lead to region-specific rollouts until the company can optimise for various accents and languages.
Last week, the company said it was testing "Facebook at Work", a version of its leading social network tailored for getting jobs done in workplaces instead of tuning into the lives of friends.
(Also see: Facebook at Work Talk Puts Pressure on LinkedIn)
Get your daily dose of tech news, reviews, and insights, in under 80 characters on Gadgets 360 Turbo. Connect with fellow tech lovers on our Forum. Follow us on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News for instant updates. Catch all the action on our YouTube channel.