Following the announcement alongside other expressive features last November, Google Messages is now more widely rolling out — especially to beta users — Voice Moods and a redesign of the audio recorder interface with noise cancellation.
You can now tap the voice memo button in the bottom-right corner of a conversation to bring up a new reordering UI. For those that are accustomed to long-pressing, the old approach remains with a new indicator informing them of the ability to swipe up/unlock and get that redesign.
This revamp lets you “Tap to record your voice” with the microphone icon flanked by Cancel and Attach at the bottom. Once started, you get a nice waveform and the ability to immediately Restart or Stop, as well as an on/off control for the new Noise cancellation capability.
Thanks to user feedback, we’ve also improved the overall audio quality of voice messages by increasing the bitrate and sampling rate.
The latter lets you pick from one of nine Voice Moods that basically adds an animated emoji background to the audio message card, which saw a Material 3 tweak in March. If you turn off expressive animations, it goes static.
- Smiling Face with Hearts
- Rolling on the Floor Laughing
- Partying Face
- Loudly Crying Face
- Slightly Smiling Face
- Enraged Face
- Face with Open Mouth
- Face with Rolling Eyes
- Crying Face
In our testing today, Voice Moods are only available in RCS conversations. For SMS/MMS, you just get the updated recorder design.
It has taken some time for this update to widely roll out. As of today, the audio recorder redesign is available on all Android phones running the latest Google Messages beta (version20240501_RC00) that we checked. Meanwhile, stable users appeared to get this way before people on the preview channel.
Meanwhile, Voice Moods is not yet widely available in beta. It only appeared on one of our devices this afternoon.
That expressive capability might not be for everyone, but the audio recorder redesign is quite nice and goes hand-in-hand with existing transcription capability in Google Messages.
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