Twitter users who have an urgent thought to share can now send a voice recording as a tweet. The social media network said Wednesday the feature is now live for iPhone holders, and didn’t say when the feature will be available for Android users.
Each audio tweet caps out after 140 seconds — or just under two and a half minutes — of recording, but a new voice tweet will start automatically to create a thread if the user needs to exceed the time limit.
Once the audio tweets are captured and sent out, they’ll populate the rest of the Twitter timeline alongside text and multimedia posts. Right now it’s unclear if Twitter will add a feature that translates the audio tweets into text for any hard-of-hearing listeners. Twitter did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
“There’s a lot that can be left unsaid or uninterpreted using text, so we hope voice tweeting will create a more human experience for listeners and storytellers alike,” Twitter said in a Wednesday blog post. “Whether it’s #storytime about your encounter with wild geese in your neighborhood, a journalist sharing breaking news, or a first-hand account from a protest, we hope voice tweeting gives you the ability to share your perspectives quickly and easily with your voice.”
Twitter users that own Android phones were quick to voice their displeasure that, predictably, the iPhone users got the feature first. “I swear Twitter hates Android,” one user wrote. It’s worth noting it’s a common practice for tech companies to update their iPhone apps first, simply because Apple’s products are ubiquitous worldwide and easier to patch than Android.
Some users weren’t entirely excited about the new feature, and a few pointed out that this wasn’t exactly the update Twitter fans were clamoring for. In fact, many have been asking Twitter for awhile to allow tweets to be edited post-publishing — but that feature is likely far away, because Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey vetoed the idea in an interview with Wired in January.
One Twitter user named Leah raised the point that this feature is very similar to the native Siri apps on iPhones that allow voice-to-text dictation in the Twitter app already. “Voice message are an abomination, just use your phone’s speech to text or type it out,” she noted.
list of people who asked for this feature pic.twitter.com/ei6lWdhF1f
— ava | hobi love bot (@cuIthoseok) June 17, 2020