WhatsApp To Soon Let You Switch Between Voice and Video Calls

Trycolyn Pikirayi Avatar
Whatsapp

Have you ever been on a WhatsApp voice call and then wanted to show the person on the other end of the line something? The natural thing to do would be to take a picture and send it to them; but what if the ‘something’ is in motion and hence a picture won’t do justice to it?

Of course, there are other ways to manipulate or go around it but most haven’t been as convenient. One of the ways would be to hang up and call again, this time using video call. But then again, if you live in Zimbabwe for example where network can be an issue, it might then take you forever to reconnect and at that point the flow of the conversation would have been disrupted.

It’s a good thing WhatsApp recognised all this and for some months now they have been working on a way to solve that. Very soon, you will be able to switch from a WhatsApp voice call to a video call and vice versa at will without actually disrupting the call.

For now, this feature is only available for WhatsApp Beta testers on Android (update to latest version to try it out) and here is a screenshot of how it will look like:

However, you might be worried right now to say what if someone just switches to a video call during your voice call and you’re in the wrong environment? Well, no worries, the WA team covered that bit as well.

So what happens is, during a voice call and one of you wants to switch to video, they will have to tap on the video icon (as highlighted on the screenshot). Thereafter, the person on the other end of the line will receive a notification which will prompt them to either accept or reject the video call request. If rejected, the voice call continues undisturbed and if accepted, the call will switch to a video call.

Sound ideal to you? Do you think that this feature will be useful to you?

2 comments

  1. Anonymous

    It’s available on WhatsApp beta for all platforms

  2. Tofara Yaniso Dube

    Good article. Parastatals are not necessarily loss makers. The only problem is that some state-owned companies and parastatals are just not necessary. For example, why does the government require a company that manufactures motor vehicles? Then other parastatals are disruptive to certain sectors. For example, why do we have Zinwa disrupting municipality operations when local government and central government are able to provide water to citizens? If we assume that ZESA is required, should we not let it operate with minimum interference, and is ZESA an efficient organisation?

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