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Ask HN: Can you please add transcription to vocal messages in messaging apps?

75 points by nassimsoftware ↗ HN
I know that there are employees of big tech companies lurking around here. I have a feature request.

Can you please add the ability to see the transcript of a vocal message on messaging apps like Teams, Signal, Telegram, Messenger, Discord, Slack, Whatsapp, etc?

I know that live transcription is already a thing so it must be feasible, right?

This feature would be super useful to see what was said without having to playback a bunch of vocal messages.

I had the idea of doing this myself a long time ago but I basically needed to recreate the entire messaging infrastructure just to add this feature. So I donate the idea here.

37 comments

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trampish
This would be a big step forward in improving accessibility for the hard of hearing.
lowkj
100% agree, personally I just prefer typing but seems like I am not in the majority. I very often receive audio replies to my typed messages and it’s very frustrating. 70% of the time, I’m not in a position where I can easily listen to the audio vs just reading text. The other 30% of the time I’m simply annoyed as I do not want to be forced to listen to the audio.
nassimsoftware
I'd like to add to this that the transcription doesn't even need to be 100% accurate to be useful. It'll mostly be used to get the gist of what was said and target more specifically which audio message requires to be re-listened to instead of having to listen to everything again.
0max
You just described the Google Voice voicemail experience
ASalazarMX
I don't even need a TTS feature, just let me mark my chat as only-text please. People that send audios tend to consume more of my time than people who write because they are making up their mind as they speak.

They seem to think: why waste my time putting my thoughts into words when I can waste everyone else's time while I figure out my ideas?

ximeng
Wechat has this feature
paxys
FYI Slack does this already for all uploaded audio & video clips, and it works great.
nassimsoftware
Would be great if they added this for audio clips. Does Slack support vocal messaging? It has been a long time since I used Slack.
cianmm
This seems like such an obvious Appley feature for iMessage, especially now that transcription can be done on-device.
ximeng
They've just added automatic OCR of photos as well to allow copy and paste from pictures of text.
natdempk
Yeah, they already do it for voicemails as well which is nice, so it's surprising they wouldn't take the next step and implement it for iMessage voice. Though I will say the voicemail transcriptions aren't amazing in quality.
mbesto
Isn't this a privacy issue with E2E encryption?
nassimsoftware
If it's done on device is there still a security risk?
caymanjim
Voice-to-text transcription can be done entirely on-device, although I'm not sure what the quality of existing solutions is. This is a barrier but not a showstopper.
toast0
The questions then become --- can you trust the system on-device transcription to preserve privacy or can you justify the size of the datasets for transcription if you've got to include it/download it for secure offline use; and can you make it work reasonably well in the languages your users use. (bonus points if it can reasonably detect the spoken language which may not match the written language of the phone).
solarkraft
If it’s sent to the cloud still only kind of, since many of these services aren’t E2EE to begin with.
natdempk
At least for iOS they already do on-device transcription for voicemails, but not voice messages sent via other means.
elcano
I have been using on device transcription on my old Pixel. Here is a demo of the 2 years old technology: https://youtu.be/zfOPF069Xn0

But what I'm looking forward is the new technology in the Pixel 6. Besides much better transcription, caption and translation (see the video completely) it could even solve the real problem by letting people send text messages by speaking into theirs phones with better quality than before.

https://youtu.be/tSAYtwTqppA

juusto
I would love the opposite: text messages that can be go from text-to-speech. Specially useful when doing chores and those long threads some people write. Or one of those busy groups where everyone is saying something. Just hit play and let the phone read them all. (I use WhatsApp)

Or is this a feature I am unaware on phones?

kpozin
I think you can ask Siri or Google Assistant to read your new messages (by accessing the phone notification contents), but I'm not aware of in-app features.
chefkoch
Google Assistent can read out your messages, but i haven't tried out of it can read from one specific group chat.
scoot
Siri can read text from apps (messages, email, etc.): "Hey Siri, read the last WhatsApp from John".

It will ask permission for access the first time you try.

zwog
There are several Telegram bots for this. But of course very questionable in terms of privacy. I had the idea to write one myself, I found an open source project to host it myself, but I don't remember the name.

Fortunately, the voice messages have largely stopped with my contacts, so I didn't pursue it any furth

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peterhi
Oh yes, I've forgotten things and looked at my phone and gone "I know it's on here, which app was it?" Make all the messages texts searchable

And whilst we are at it: TRANSCRIBE THE PHONE CALLS TOO!!!

solarkraft
Basically transcribe everything and make it searchable. Wish that was more common for podcasts and videos.
Sophira
There's a really important point that everybody is missing here. Transcribing phone calls is, in a sense, equivalent to recording a call. Having automatic transcription may not even be legal without letting the other party know.
ksec
May be this should be an OS feature rather than a Per App feature?

I wish they could transcribe my Voice Mail too. Whenever I have a voice mail, auto call the mail box and transcribe it for me. 99% of it are junk. But just in case there is one real voice message.

solarkraft
Please. It’s so (seemingly) obvious that I don’t understand why it’s not a thing yet. These people aren’t idiots, are they? This is obvious, isn’t it? Is it organizational failure? Or is the technology really, actually, not there yet?
40four
I think you’re overthinking it. It’s certainly feasible, I’m sure it’s been thought of and brought up many times in meetings, It’s just not profitable. The answer, like with many things, is simply money I believe. The compute resources needed to implement & maintain this type of feature at scale, for even a single platform would probably cost many millions of dollars.

So unfortunately, I doubt we will get this anytime soon. They would have to spend huge amounts of money & resources to add this, for essentially no financial gain.

an21mm
zenly lets you do it already