Quick Summary
Meta has added some fun new sticker features and a new media viewer to WhatsApp on Android, and more features are incoming: Meta AI sticker generation and AI Voice will use AI to make WhatsApp more personal.
WhatsApp has released a new version of its Android app, and it contains several big improvements to the user experience that should make your chats more fun. Some of those improvements are already in the iOS app too.
The first key feature, which iOS got in a recent update and Android is getting now, is GIPHY stickers: this brings the huge GIPHY image library to your app so you can quickly search for stickers to send to your friends or family, or to the boss if you're feeling brave. The feature will also enable you to store your most-used stickers at the top of the list so you can get to them faster.
That's not all. There's also a new Custom Sticker Maker, again bringing Android up to speed with iOS. It enables you to turn your photos into personalised stickers or customise existing ones with tools such as cropping, drawing and adding text. Once you've created yours they're automatically saved to the sticker tray for easy access.
In addition to the GIPHY stickers, WhatsApp has also added a new media viewer designed to display photos and videos in full-screen. The new viewer has zoom and swipe gestures for easy navigation and is now part of the core app; previously it was only available to beta testers.
Meta's working on AI features to make WhatsApp more personal
In addition to the new features, Meta is increasingly looking at bringing AI to its apps, including WhatsApp: a new AI sticker feature, currently limited to users in the US, uses Meta's Generative AI to create custom stickers from your text descriptions. Those stickers are automatically labelled with emoji so they can still be understood by people with screen readers.
Meta is also working on another AI feature for WhatsApp: AI Voice. It's appeared in early betas of the app and enables you to talk to WhatsApp instead of typing and to get a spoken respomnse; it apparently enables you to choose an AI personality for your responses with options including chilled-out voices or something more energetic. As with other Meta AI features, that's likely to be US-only to begin with.
