It’s no secret that group video conferences have benefited from particular growth in recent years, particularly with the democratization of teleworking almost everywhere in the world. And while WhatsApp has established itself as one of the most popular instant messaging apps over the years, it’s not necessarily the most obvious choice when it comes to multi-person video conferences. . The fault in particular is a certain lack of functionalities essential for practice. However, Meta now seems to want to address these problems in several new updates coming in the following weeks.
Three new features to compete with Zoom
In its blog, WhatsApp announces three new functions. First, it will now be possible to share your screen with audio. The screen sharing function is not new to the application, but the fact of being able to add the audio of the screen will allow the many members of the call to watch videos together for example. However, no information has been communicated regarding potential problems linked to copyright: will it be possible to watch a film or series in streaming with several people via screen sharing, for example?
Furthermore, the number of participants in video calls will be increased to 32, which will allow WhatsApp to establish itself as a more suitable solution for businesses, for example. Finally, WhatsApp will highlight the person speaking with a highlight, as is already the case in many other services of this type.
The improvements made to WhatsApp over the coming weeks will not be limited to group video calls: Meta announces as well as “mobile calls will benefit from better noise and echo cancellation in noisy environments, and video calls will have better broadband resolution“. These contributions on the sound side thus appear directly linked to the recent addition of the MLow audio codec.