Twitter is set to begin testing voice DMs with a view to rolling the feature out to all users. Alessandro Paluzzi confirmed this in a tweet of her own with accompanying screenshots to show what it will look like.
Twitter added audio tweets to the platform back in June so this is a fairly logical progression to move it onto the messaging service. Such an innovation comes at a good time for Twitter as it allows the company to focus on more positive news.
Earlier in September Twitter admitted it needed to do more to eradicate racial bias in its algorithms. This comes after experiments showed that photo algorithms employed by the company show racial prioritization.
The company has also had to add more security measures to protect political accounts. This comes after a number of breaches threatened high powered political figures.
Overall, this seems to be a sensible move from Twitter given their addition of audio tweets. However, we are yet to receive any idea of when this feature may roll out after testing as reported by The Verge.
Twitter set to begin testing of audio DMs
The beginning of testing of audio DMs was confirmed by product manager for direct messages at Twitter, Alex Ackerman-Greenberg. He let us know of the news in a 20-second voice message, further showing off the company’s focus on audio.
He said, “we know people want more options for how they express themselves in conversations on Twitter — both publicly and privately”.
Just like the voice tweets interface, the one for audio DMs is fairly bare-bones but simple to use. There is a play/pause button and when the message plays avatar pulsates.
The reason for this simple design was to ensure an “in-line recording experience”. This comes with the hope that this “will make it easier to send these messages as part of the natural conversation flow”.
The only addition is that audio DMs do come with a “report message” option. This is positive as it allows users to easily report any hate or harmful voice messages.
Audio messages continue to face accessibility concerns
It is interesting to see Twitter press on with its audio drive after the criticism it received after adding audio tweets. Many people complained to the company as they felt that audio tweets did not factor in accessibility concerns.
Design Chief, David Davis, did respond to this issue by stating “we shipped something that shouldn’t have been shipped without this conversation happening.”
He went onto say that “we also changed our product development process, so that accessibility is always considered during even the conceptualization of features”.
Hopefully, this new process will be in place in the conception of audio DMs. However, on the whole, this seems to be an exciting development. This will work as long as Twitter can cater to all of these accessibility concerns.