Twitter has decided to roll out its brand new feature of letting users add their voice on twitter. 140-second audio clips to their tweets. In a recent blog post, product designer Maya Patterson and senior software engineer Remy Bourgoin said, “Sometimes, 280 characters aren’t enough, and some conversational nuances are lost in translation.”
In an attempt to add a more ‘human touch’ to the platform, Twitter’s up to the minute feature lets everyone add a personal touch to their tweets- their own voice on twitter. We can now hear politicians speak with their exact vigor, storytellers with their voice modulations, celebrities sing their songs out, and our friends updating us with the same excitement that they would one on one, all through tweets.
However, the feature mentioned above is only limited to a handful of iOS handsets, as it is still in its testing mode.
Steps to voice-tweet
- Click on the Tweet compose icon.
- Tap on the voice icon, which represents a ‘wavelength.’
- Click on the red colored record button and start recording your message.
- Click ‘Done’ once you’re finished.
5. You can even add text to your voice tweet as per your need.
6. The maximum limit is 2 minutes 20 seconds, after which it can be further parsed into 25 Tweets.
7. Tap ‘Tweet’ when you’re done.
How does a voice tweet look like?
Once you click ‘Tweet,’ your voice tweet shall go up with your avatar enclosed in a circle floating in a monochromatic background, pulsating while it runs its course of playing the audio. Your avatar would be your current profile picture and is not subject to any change, even if you update your profile picture after posting your audio clip.
Your audio tweet shall appear just as regular tweets would on your followers’ timeline. The duration is visible with a timing bar at the bottom, which your followers can slide to listen at a particular instance. Users can pause, play, and replay the voice tweet per their needs. Your followers can even download the voice note, and the number of listens show up right below the voice tweet.
If you want to listen to someone else’s voice tweet, you can tap on their image to do so. On iPhones, it altogether minimizes as an audio dock at the bottom of the screen so that you can scroll through your timeline and keeping reading other tweets while listening to it.
Why and how do voice tweets have the upper hand over typed tweets?
Previously, we had a 280 character limit for tweets, as levied by Twitter. However, interaction through voice is far more coherent, feasible, and humane. We can express our exact emotions, intentions, and tones without contemplating over exclamation marks or full stops anymore. We are no more secluded within 280 characters, given that our voice tweets can be further parsed into 25 Tweets. It proffers us an option to record sufficiently long tweets so that nothing is left unsaid.
The facet of letting us add text to it only brightens this feature, as it permits us to post the context of our voice tweet as well. Twitter has also claimed that we can keep listening to audio tweets while we are fidgeting with some other app or doing some additional work on our handsets like going through our emails or scrolling through Instagram, making it akin to micro-podcasts.
This feature is still in its testing mode and has been made available to a few iOS devices, with the sole aim to add a more ‘human touch’ to the platform.
How is this feature going to change the way we use applications?
Futurists and farsighted technicians and engineers are claiming that with this feature being rolled out, typing a tweet or writing a caption will be ancient history.
Just like Snapchat corroborated with SoundHound to introduce their voice assistant to pick out the perfect filter for us, we soon will have every application known to man using voice-technology to simplify their configurations.
Instead of reading texts or typing/writing them, we’ll either be listening to them or dictating them. We won’t have to struggle in crowded subways or public transports trying to focus hard on what to type in our tweets or captions, or even take the pains of proofreading them! We can record our thoughts with the help of a voice. With applications rolling out techniques to add filters and effects to voice-notes such as that of Blerp, we will soon have creators creating effects to use in audio clips instead of selfies, as said by Mark C Webster in his recent voice tweet.
