One of the most widely used online messaging platform Whatsapp which is owned by Facebook has now reportedly launched the highly anticipated feature, that is the group voice and video calling.
It was in May that the company announced at Facebook’s F8 developer conference that it would be bringing group calling with both voice and video support later on this year. And now, the feature has been rolled out and is available for users all over the world. It will be available on both iOS and Android devices starting today.
“Group calls are always end-to-end encrypted, and we’ve designed calling to work reliably around the world in different network conditions,” the company said.
The feature will support up to four people at a time, regardless of the location of the user. However, it can be expected that the company will soon be updating its app to support more than four people at a time. To start using the group calling feature, the user can tap on the new “add participant” button in the top right corner while on a video or a voice call to add more contacts to the call.
The company also claimed that it has engineered the feature to work under less-than-stellar network conditions, so as the people can video chat a friend or family member from a far-flung locale so long as you can get yourself online.
The group voice call screen will have profile pictures of all three participants as well as their names separated by a comma. On the other hand, the video call screen will not have names of participants, but video feeds from friends.
Currently, the platform claims to have 1.5 billion monthly active users. It was in 2014 that WhatsApp launched its voice calling feature, and soon after that it also launched the video chatting feature in 2016. And now, with the all-new feature, it is making some good efforts to attract more users.