WhatsApp voice notes have been around for quite a while and have grown in popularity over the last few years. With increased popularity came improvements to features. The team has worked to keep improving the feature from simplifying how voice notes are recorded to consecutive playback of multiple recordings in WhatsApp.
As announced in February, WhatsApp is working on a global playback feature. This will allow the voice note to be played in the background while the user responds to other messages or chats. The global playback feature is already available on iOS and is available for beta testing on Android devices.
In the past, if you received a voice note, you’d have to play it and remain in the current chat until the voice note finished. If you leave the chat, the voice message will immediately stop playing. While this isn’t a big issue when you get short messages, it can become quite annoying when receiving long voice notes.
The global voice note player remedies this issue by playing the voice note in the background. This means that the user can navigate away from the current chat and read or respond to other chats while still listening to the voice note.
WABetaInfo revealed that the global voice note tool appears as a player bar at the top of your screen. You can navigate the rest of the app from below this player. This allows effortless multitasking, which most of us do daily.
This feature was part of WhatsApp beta version 2.22.7.21. However, the feature did not roll out to all Android testers but rather just a select few. So if you don’t see it on your beta version, don’t panic. You’re not missing out, but you have to be more patient; it’s coming.
