Facebook Is Testing A Voice-To-Text Feature For Its Messenger App
Facebook Messenger offers the ability to send
voice clips to your friends without typing any text. Now Facebook is
testing a feature that helps people read the voice clips that were
received instead of having to play them out loud. This can be useful if
you are at a quiet library or a loud concert.
To send a voice message on Facebook Messenger,
tap on the microphone icon to record a message. After you send the
message, Facebook will transcribe it for users. Next to the voice
message is an icon with three lines. Tapping on that icon auto-creates
the transcription of the voice message. The transcript accuracy depends
on interference, accents and the clarity of the call. “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,” said David Marcus, the vice president of messaging products
at Facebook in a post.
Facebook’s voice-to-text feature is similar to the way Google Voice
works. Google Voice turns voicemail messages into text and sends it to
the inboxes of its users. The accuracy of the Google Voice
transcriptions have plenty of room for improvement, but it seems to be
getting better over time. This will be the same case for Facebook
Messenger.Earlier this month, Facebook acquired speech recognition company Wit.ai. Wit.ai offers an API for developers to add voice control to their products by adding a few lines of code. Wit.ai is being used by more than 6,000 developers and is powering hundreds of apps and devices. “Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone and build amazing experiences for the over 1.3 billion people on the platform – technology that understands natural language is a big part of that, and we think we can help,” said Wit.ai in a blog post.
Facebook’s Voice To Text Feature / Credit: David Marcus
Last year, Facebook was criticized for
separating the Messenger app from the main Facebook app. The Facebook
Messenger app now has more than 500 million users that send over 10
billion messages per day. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the
Messenger was made into a separate app because it would be a better
experience for messaging rather than opening up a separate tab within the main Facebook app.
Do you use the voice messaging feature on the Facebook Messenger
app? Would the voice-to-text feature be useful for you? Let us know in
the comments below! 