As an essential part of communications within the Google Workspace ecosystem,Google Chatdoesn’t often get a lot of attention. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that Google wants Workspace users to access Chat more than they do, as evidenced by itsintegration within the Gmail appson mobile and web. Google Chat is now reportedly working on a rather essential feature we associate with mostinstant messaging appstoday — voice messages.
Trusted leakerAssembleDebugdetailed this new discovery onTheSpAndroid, saying the feature was enabled after flipping a flag in the Google Chat app for Android. It will reportedly roll out by the first quarter of 2024, so we may not be far away from having voice messaging enabled on the app. AssembleDebug didn’t reveal the flag that enabled voice messages on Google Chat but said that the same flag was also available within the Gmail app. This isn’t particularly surprising given the email app’s built-in support for Google Chat.
Voice messages/recordings can be activated via the mic button on the bottom right of the screen, as shown above. It takes the place of thesendbutton, which reappears when the user starts typing within the text field or when they’ve finished recording the audio.
The audio recording UI is accompanied by a conventional waveform, with a delete icon on the bottom left to restart the recording and a pause button to halt it temporarily. A similar waveform UI appears when the voice message is sent, along with the duration of the audio. These voice messages can reportedly be sent to one-on-one and group texts on Chat, while we presume it’ll also be available in Spaces.
The voice recording UI in Google Chat and Gmail
While voice messaging has been a staple of messaging apps like WhatsApp, it’s rather surprising that Google hasn’t brought it to Chat yet. It’s worth noting here that Google Messages, the default texting (SMS/RCS) app on mostnew Android phones, comes with voice messaging capabilities.
Multiple users on the Google Cloud Community forum have requested the addition of voice messages in Google Chat forquite a while now. It now looks like Google is finally ready to make the jump in a forthcoming update. If speculations of a first-quarter release hold true, we expect to find this functionality sometime over the next few weeks. In other recent Google Chat news, theMentionstab is beingrelocated to a new three-dot menuon the navigation bar, thus hiding it from plain view. This rearrangement took place to accommodate the newly added Starred messages option.
