Meta added Stories not only to Instagram and Facebook, but also WhatsApp, where we receive something quite similar in the form of “status” updates. You may already post images, videos, GIFs, and text messages to your status, but you may soon have access to an entirely new option: voice notes.
Notably, Snapchat pioneered the notion of ‘uploading 24 hours stories’ — photo/video/text uploads that automatically disappear after a day — before being imitated by Instagram and, subsequently, every imaginable app available.
According to data obtained by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp appears to be working on a feature that would allow users to record and post audio messages to their WhatsApp status. Once the feature is available, the app should allow you to record an audio message, much similar to how you can now inside a chat. This could include uploading existing audio files (because such can also be sent as messages in WhatsApp chats), but we haven’t seen any proof yet.
Voice recordings in status updates would be shared with your WhatsApp contacts using the same privacy settings as images and videos, and they, too, would be end-to-end encrypted.
WhatsApp is not the only app experimenting with voice stories. Since a while ago, Twitter has been testing the ability to post voice tweets on iOS, but not everyone has yet access to the capability. However, in the case of WhatsApp, it appears to be a more logical expansion of the status feature; the app already enables audio messages and has done so for a number of years.
Unfortunately, this feature is still under development and not at all usable yet — not even for beta testers. But when the feature is rolled out, it will probably start with the beta users of the app before rolling out to everyone else.
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