Twitter has started testing a new feature which will allow users to send direct voice messages to other users, after recently announcing new audio tweets.
In a recent statement, DM product manager Alex Ackerman-Greenberg revealed that the social media giant will be testing the feature in Brazil. The feature was first noted as being in testing by Matt Navarra a couple of weeks ago.
Twitter Tests Private Audio Messages Feature in Brazil
Voice messages will be 20-seconds long and have a simple play/pause button to control received messages. There’s also a ‘report message’ feature for the potential abuse this feature might bring. As reported by The Verge:
“After rolling out audio tweets for iOS in June, Twitter is now experimenting with the idea of letting people record and send voice messages through direct messages. Alex Ackerman-Greenberg, product manager for direct messages at Twitter, let me know that the company will be testing voice DMs soon. Brazil will be the first country included in that test. He shared the news… through a 20-second voice message. “We know people want more options for how they express themselves in conversations on Twitter — both publicly and privately,” he said.”
In June, the social media giant introduced a voice tweeting feature for iOS users that allows users to tweet with their voice. Voice tweets can be used to record original tweets on users’ timelines. The maximum time limit for each tweet is 2 minutes 20 seconds. However, if any user records for a longer time period, a thread will automatically be created with up to 25 voice tweets.
The feature, criticized for a lack of accessibility, particularly among the visually impaired, deaf, or hard of hearing, was later updated to make voice tweets more easily identifiable on the timeline,
That should not be an issue with this upcoming feature. The social media giant now has a “full-time accessibility team within product development,” design chief Dantley Davis told The Verge. “We also changed our product development process, so that accessibility is always considered during even the conceptualization of features.”
Currently, only Facebook and Instagram allow users to send private audio recordings in direct messages.
2 comments