Gone are the days when WhatsApp was a service designed to allow two people to communicate via text and instantly using their respective smartphones. And yes, I know it may seem like I’m talking about pre-history, but the truth is that until rivals emerged that could pose a threat to its market dominance,Those responsible took it much more calmly than expected..

This cIt contrasted with the speed at which other services were adding new features, improved their functionality, made progress in security and privacy… in short, Meta took WhatsApp’s position in the market for granted for quite a long time and concentrated its efforts in other areas of business. However, 2021 marked a significant change in trend and since then it is undeniable that they have increased and that it is a rare month when the service does not add one or two interesting new features, or at least put them in the test. in their beta versions.

As of today, some of its rivals have some features that WhatsApp does not have, but day by day this list is shrinking and to Meta’s delight, the dean of instant messaging services for smartphones did not for a moment leave the first place in the ranking of the most used services. And even luckier for Meta, because second on the list is Facebook Messenger, which in turn is part of the most used social network in the world today, Facebook (surprising as it may be to many).

As I said, Meta has been aware of the need to constantly improve the service for some time, and as we can read in TechCrunch, they have done just that again, since Meta announced the arrival of voice chats to WhatsApp groups. As we can read in the mentioned publication, the deployment of this feature will take place gradually over the coming weeks, initially it will be applied to groups with 33 or more users and end-to-end encryption will be active by default.

And what is the difference between voice chat and group calls? The key at this point is that the novelty is much less intrusive than the calls. When you call a group, the ringtone will ring on all devices, while voice chat won’t. Instead, a notification is simply displayed, which can be silent, and the user can join the conversation by tapping the icon displayed in the upper right corner. This format is very common in other communication tools such as Discord, where the main function is voice communication on the servers.