Tired of minutes of voice messages in WhatsApp or iMessages? Textify turns spoken words into written text.
–
Enlarge
Spoken or written text
© Bohbeh / shutterstock.com
–
–
–
Voice messages in messengers such as Whatsapp or iMessage can be pronounced quickly and are very practical if, for example, you dictate your messages while on the move and the recipient only has to listen to them. But that’s exactly what not everyone likes to do, since a three-minute text has to be listened to for just as long. Then just read about it quickly. That can be annoying – or completely impractical.
Speech to text
One option is therefore to convert the spoken text into writing. This is exactly what the app “Textify – reading instead of hearing!” for received voice messages, which, according to the developer, supports Whatsapp, Telegram, iMessage, Threema, Signal and Line Messenger. And that in a wide variety of languages, plus video messages.
We are primarily interested in whether the app can be used to convert a voice message into text relatively easily and effectively. To do this, you pass such a sound message in WhatsApp via the command forward and share to Textify (> ”Convert with Textify”), select the desired language and then watch how the voice message is converted into text. This can then (since version 1.3) be copied to the clipboard. If a text is longer, the process stops, with ”Continue reading” the rest is also transferred. It works similarly in the other messengers, the app describes each.
The result depends very much on the quality of the source material, i.e. how clearly someone spoke. If someone mumbles or if there is a lot of background noise, for example from the street, the result is correspondingly worse or difficult to understand.
As a reference, we can, so to speak, use the professional voice recording of a short podcast, sent to us via Threema. This recording is translated back practically perfectly into the written language as a sound file.
Not super fast, but practical
The speed of the transformations is not super fast, sometimes it is tougher and you can literally watch the transformation word for word. In principle, Textify is a good tool, but it is only really useful if the underlying voice messages are spoken in a clearly understandable manner and you actually have no way or no desire to listen to them directly. But then – or to copy spoken text in writing and record it – this is an alternative to listening to voice messages that we have long wanted.
Textify – reading instead of listening gives it up
iOS 10.0 in the App Store – you pay just under four euros for this
. That’s a steep price for an app that is only worthwhile if you want to use it all the time. It is a bit cheaper if you ignore the spoken messages in general …
– .
