Features I would love to see in Whatsapp!

Like everyone in India, I am a heavy user of Whatsapp. In fact, I use a lot of collaboaration platforms, such as IBM Notes / IBM Verse (for office email), Yahoo Mail, Facebook & Twitter to name a few. In all of these collaboration platforms, I end up receiving fairly large amount of content. Whatsapp is probably more notorious when it comes to receiving forwards from people, which include posts with lots of text and long videos. Since some of these are worth reading, or watching, I end up spending a lot of time reading through more than screenful of the text, as well as downloading the videos and browsing through them. Often, after downloading the video and playing it a bit, I realize that I am not interested in it. So my efforts are lost. Also for reading large articles, I need to ensure that I am doing only the reading and not multi-tasking (like reading while driving). I beieve having some of these features outlined below incorporated in Whatsapp and other collaboration products would go a long way in freeing up the user from reading endless text, and would help save lots of time.

  • Read the post for me: Allow me to select a received post, and click a button to have the phone start reading the text. So I can put on my headphones and listen to it.
  • Summary transcript of the video: Show me a small summary or transcript of the Video, even before the video is downloaded. This would help me figure out if I should download that large video or not. Just a small mock-up below:
  • Summary transcript or a snippet for audio: Allow me to see a summary or a transcript or a hear a small snippet of an audio received.
  • I also find myself in situations where either because I am out for a few days or some Whatsapp group get super busy, only to find a group (or groups) with large number of unread messages. Curiosity makes me go through most of the messages, atleast scan them. In majority situations, most of the messages could have been simply ignored. Would be great if there was a feature which summarized the unread messages in , and grouped them providing the summary. And if there was anything for me, to highlight it. Similar feature already exists in another product I work with – IBM Watson Workspace. , and a feature like “Moments“.

So Whatsapp, Facebook & other social collaboration applications, what are you waiting for? Let’s implement these in the next update so we can be more efficient with our time.  And if you have ideas about more that you would like to see, please add a response to this post with your thoughts.

5 thoughts on “Features I would love to see in Whatsapp!”

  1. Excellent idea Raj!! This has become nightmare for me as my whatsapp gets flooded with so many videos and messages I end up missing some important messages.
    One more thing that i feel is – tagging message with importance. Whatsapp should provide me an option to define my priorities so that my priority messages are showed on top and there should be some icon that say I need to perform some action on those messages.
    Also there should be an option to show popup after I watch video or read message to delete it. It’ll clean up my space as well. Else all videos should be deleted unless i hit “Don’t delete” button while watching.

  2. Good to have these features. Tags to give a summary of the video will be really helpful.

    In between there was a video preview feature available, but its no longer there.

    I heard of submitting such ideas on the WhatsApp FB page, try it.

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