Guide to Whatsapp Voice Messages, tricks and problems solved

Whatsapp gives the possibility to send audio messages in a simple and fast way, using the microphone button. These audio messages can then be heard by those who receive them and are very comfortable when we are in the car or when we cannot write by hand on the keyboard.
However, these voice notes may stop working at times, for example if the audio recording stops immediately or if you are unable to hear a received message or if you receive an error “This audio is not available“.
So let’s go see some tricks to send and receive voice messages and then how troubleshoot sending or listening problems.

READ ALSO: All the ways to write and send messages on Whatsapp

How Whatsapp voice messages work

To send a voice message on Whatsapp just press the microphone icon next to the writing field and hold down while recording. The moment you release your finger, the message is sent.
If you swipe left while recording, yes cancel the registration which is no longer sent.
If, on the other hand, while recording the voice message, you drag your finger upwards on thepadlock icon, then you can release your finger and continue talking anyway. Once finished, you will have to press the send key to finish and send the voice note.
To listen to a voice message just press the Play button. If you want to listen to a voice message that is not hands-free, you can press the Play button of the message and then bring the phone close to your ear as you would when you are on the phone, immediately the audio of the smartphone speaker is muted and you can listen to the message without making it heard by everyone.
Whatsapp voice messages can also be sent from PC, using Whatsapp from the website. In this case, a microphone must be connected to the computer.
Finally, it should be noted that themicrophone icon when receiving a message is colored differently depending on whether the message has been listened to or not: verde, if it is not heard, blu if you have listened to the voice message.
Sent voicemails also have a different colored icon: gray microphone if the sent message has not yet been listened to, blu instead if it has been listened to.
A trick to not let people know that a received voice message has been heard (and therefore not to color the icon in blue), is to select it and then use the Share button that appears on the bar at the top. Then choose another application such as Telegram or the app to listen to music to hear it without letting it know. Another way to listen to messages without letting them know is to forward the voice message to another number and listen to it from another smartphone.
All voicemails received can be forwarded to other chats as you would any message or photo.

Send written messages by dictating them verbally

A voice message is sent as an audio file that the recipient can listen to on their phone. The sender, however, can also choose to send a message dictated verbally so that the recipient does not receive the audio recording, but a normal written message. In this case you write a message as if it were typed by hand from the keyboard, even if it was actually created vocally.
To do this we have seen, in another article, how to dictate by voice on Android and iPhone. In general, you just need to open the keyboard used to type and press the microphone key (not the Whatsapp microphone key, but the keyboard key). Just say the message to dictate it in WhatsApp and then press the key to send it as written text.
If you can’t use your hands, for example in the car, you can use Siri’s voice commands by saying “hey Siri”, and then say the words Send WhatsApp message, the name of the recipient and finally dictate the message to be written and sent.
Your Android, you can dictate a message to Whatsapp using the Ok Google voice command, which is similar to Siri. After activating Ok Google, say “send whatsapp message“, then the name of the recipient and the message to write and send.

For those who receive messages, it is possible, using other apps, convert Whatsapp voice messages into text to read, if you don’t want to waste time listening to long recordings.

Troubleshoot Whatsapp audio messages

As mentioned above, some problems may occur both in sending voice messages and in listening to received voice messages.

If you are unable to send voice messages

If you are unable to send messages with your voice in Whatsapp, the problem can have three causes:
– The phone memory is full and Whatsapp can’t store anything. In this case, consult the guides to free up space on iPhone and free up space on Android.
– Whatsapp does not have the necessary permissions to use the microphone of the smartphone. In this case the solution is different depending on the phone, whether it is one with an Android system or an iPhone.
On Android, go to Settings on the phone, then on Apps and notifications O App or Application Management, search for Whatsapp in the list of all apps, then tap on Authorizations and turn on the switch next to the Microphone.
On iPhone, open Settings, scroll down and tap WhatsApp, turn on the switch next to Microphone, or turn it off and then turn it back on.
– There is an active recording app. WhatsApp fails to record voice notes if another call recording or screen recording app is active on the phone that you need to disable or uninstall.

If you are unable to listen to the received voice messages

– First of all, make sure the volume is loud enough if you are listening to the voice notes through the speaker. If you use earphones to listen to them, you need to turn up the volume again as this is a different controller than the speakerphone.
– If your phone screen goes black when you listen to a voice message, there may be a problem with the proximity sensor. When you want to listen to a voice message privately by holding the phone to your ear, the screen turns off automatically. If this happens even when you try to listen to a speakerphone message, it may be that there is a problem with the proximity sensor, which is covered by a badly made case or by your finger.
– If the error “it is not possible to load this audio at this time“means that the message is not in memory because it has been deleted or because the available space on the phone has run out. It is therefore necessary to free up memory on the phone to return to listening to voice messages.
– On Android only, try clearing the Whatsapp app cache. To open Settingsof Android, go to Apps and notifications, then search for Whatsapp in All apps and in the Whatsapp tab, touch the key for clear the cache below the section Archiving.

Find the audio files of Whatsapp voice messages

While we know how to send them and how to listen to them, what may interest us is to know where they are saved so that we can recover or delete them. The WhatsApp audio note, in fact, they are saved in the memory of the mobile phone (taking up space), but they can only be listened to or deleted within Whatsapp.
On both Android and iPhone it is possible to use the key for each chat Clear Chat to delete all voice messages within a conversation.
Only on Android, however, it is possible to delete voice messages by deleting the audio files. To do this you need to use a file manager for Android. Using, for example, Solid Explorer, the folder to locate to find all Whatsapp voice messages is: Whatsapp/Media/Whatsapp Voice Notes

In this folder you will find many other folders each named with a number, which is the year-month date in which the voice messages were saved. Within each of these folders are files .opus, which cannot be heard as normal audio files. The only way to recognize what these voice notes are is to check the date and then go and find them in the chats where they were received. To clean up and recover space on every Android smartphone, you can delete all the folders inside Whatsapp Voice Notes.