WhatsApp beta coming to smartwatches

WhatsApp beta is rolling out to Wear OS smartwatches, including the Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch 5

Finally, the official WhatsApp application for Google’s Wear OS operating system is about to arrive. The first users of the development version, or beta, have begun to receive the application on their smart watches, which includes support for sending text messages and even voice notes.

The application, at least for now, is only available for watches such as Google’s Pixel Watch and Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5, among other models with a version of the Wear OS 3 operating system. Once installed, the app allows access to a list of recent contacts (that is, those with whom we have recently interacted or chatted through the main app on the smartphone), a settings menu and an option called “Open on phone”. Once you access a conversation, you can read previous messages and respond by typing a message using the smartwatch keyboard, or better yet, sending a voice note, something that many users have been asking for for a long time.

Until now, the only way to reply to a WhatsApp message from your smartwatch is through a notification. When receiving a message and its respective notification on the smartwatch, from the small screen you can access a list of configured quick responses, or write a message using the keyboard on the watch screen (it is also possible to dictate the response using your voice , and have the clock transcribe it to text). But once the official WhatsApp application arrives, voice messages can be sent directly without having to touch the phone.

The Wear OS operating system will also include a new WhatsApp “complication” (name given to widgets on the watch screen), which will reveal how many messages you have pending reading in the messaging application.

The arrival date of the WhatsApp application and its new functions in watches with Wear OS has not yet been announced, but we could learn more about it during the next Google I / O 2023 that will take place this week.