3 posts tagged with "Voice messages"

The voice add-on has a new name and a new version. Better Messages – Voice and Video Messages 2.0 keeps everything the voice recorder did and adds a camera button beside the microphone: short video messages, recorded in the composer, sent like any other message.

Alongside it, Better Messages 3.0 picked up two things on the voice side that this post is the right place for — voice messages that transcribe themselves the moment they are sent, and AI chat bots you can talk to instead of typing.

Better Messages transcribes voice messages in WordPress chat: anyone in the conversation presses Transcribe on a voice message, or every recording is turned into text as it is sent, and the text shows under the audio for everyone in that conversation. It needs the Voice and Video Messages add-on and one of two providers, the OpenAI Transcription API with your own key, which works on the free version too, or Better Messages Cloud AI, included with the WebSocket license.

Voice messages live in the same gap that face-to-face conversation fills and text messaging cannot: tone, hesitation, the half-sentence that becomes the answer. They are the right tool when typing is slow (mobile, on the move), the question is complex (easier to ramble than to draft), or the relationship is personal (a coach to a client, a parent in a parent-teacher chat). WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal made voice notes a default expectation. Community sites and marketplaces built on WordPress increasingly do too.