WhatsApp arrives on Android watches by sending voice notes

Finally, the official app for The WhatsApp For Google Wear OS is about to arrive. The first users of the version under development, or “beta,” have started receiving the app on their smartwatches, which includes support for sending text messages and even voice notes.

app at least for now, is available for watches such as Google’s Pixel Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch 5, among other models with a version of Wear OS 3. Once installed, the app gives you access to your list of recent contacts (that is, those with whom we’ve interacted recently Or we talked to them through the main application on the smartphone), a settings menu and an option called “Open on the phone”. Once in a conversation, you can read and reply to previous messages by typing a message using the smartwatch keyboard, or better yet, send a voice note, something many users have been asking for for a long time.

Until now, the only way to reply to a WhatsApp message from your smartwatch is through a notification. When a message and a notification about it are received on the smart watch, from the small screen you can access the configured list of quick replies, or write a message using the keyboard on the watch screen (it is also possible to dictate the response using your voice, ask the watch to transcribe it into text). But once the official WhatsApp app arrives, voice messages can be sent directly without having to touch the phone.

Wear OS will also include a new “complication” for WhatsApp (the name given to widgets on the watch screen), which will reveal how many messages are waiting to be read in the messaging app.

It hasn’t been announced yet when WhatsApp and its new functionality will arrive on Wear OS watches, but we can learn more about it during the upcoming Google I/O 2023 conference taking place this week.