WhatsApp on Thursday announced the introduction of voice and video calls to its desktop applications for Mac and PC, expanding the ways in which you can create the illusion of meaningful human interaction in this time of overwhelming isolation.
“With so many people still separated from their loved ones and adapting to new ways of working, we want WhatsApp conversations to be as close to the person as possible, regardless of where you are in the world or the technology you’re using,” owner of WhatsApp on Facebook announced in your press release, a reminder that simply talking to another human being face to face with reckless abandon can still kill you.
This is good news for those of us who are so deeply exhausted from the past year that even holding a phone seems impossible: WhatsApp’s new desktop calling feature “makes it easier to work with colleagues, see your family more clearly at a larger screen or free your hands to move around the room while talking, ”said the company. You know deep down that this is no different than using Google Meet or Zoom or FaceTime or any of the many other apps that do exactly the same thing, but the word “easier” is so compelling now that you appreciate the effort to do it. it looks like something to be happy about, if not something else.
And if you’re worried about WhatsApp (and, by extension, Facebook) hearing you sob uncontrollably as you explain to your mom in a video chat that, yes, you’ve been calling Walgreens every 15 minutes to find out if they have some leftover vaccines that they need to inject into someone’s arm before they expire and be thrown in the trash next to the rest of their life, but no, they don’t have it yet, don’t fear! “Voice and video calls on WhatsApp are encrypted from end to end, so WhatsApp cannot hear or see them if you call from your phone or computer,” says the statement.
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Voice and video calls on WhatsApp desktop apps, available for download on here, are currently limited to individual conversations, but the company promises that it plans to expand the feature for group chats sometime in the future, a period of time that remains good to think about or has become so tenuous and vague that it has been transformed in a meaningless concept, depending on where you are in your personal cycle between hope and misery. And we all know that the only thing we need now is more group chats.