WhatsApp on Thursday announced the introduction of voice and video calling in its desktop apps for Mac and PC, allowing you to create the illusion of meaningful human interaction in this moment of crushing isolation.
“With so many people still separated from their loved ones, adapting to new ways of working, we want conversations on WhatsApp to feel as personal as possible, no matter where in the world you are or use the technology you have,” WhatsApp owner Facebook announced in his press release, a reminder that simply talking in person to another human with reckless abandon can still kill you.
This is good news for those of us who have been so exhausted over the past year that even holding a phone seems impossible: the new WhatsApp call functionality on the desktop ‘makes it easier to work with colleagues, see your family more clearly on a larger canvas or free your hands to move around a room while talking, ”the company said. You know deep down that this is no different from using Google Meet or Zoom or FaceTime or any of the many other apps that do the exact same thing, but that word ‘easier’ is so compelling right now that you’ll appreciate the effort to doing this seems like something to be happy when nothing else.
And if you’re worried about WhatsApp (and, by extension, Facebook) listening to you, sob uncontrollably as you explain to your mom in a video chat that you’ve indeed called Walgreens every 15 minutes to find out if they have one. leftover vaccines to inject into someone’s arm before expiring and thrown in the trash alongside the rest of your life, but no, they still don’t have any available, fear not! “Voice and video calls on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted, so WhatsApp cannot hear or see them, whether you are calling from your phone or your computer,” the press release reads.
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Voice and video calls on WhatsApp’s desktop apps, available for download here, are currently limited to one-on-one conversations, but the company promises it plans to expand the feature into group chats in the future, a period that will either remain pleasant to think about or be so weak and has become vague that it turned into a meaningless concept, depending on where you are in your personal cycle between hope and misery. And we all know that all we need now is more group chats.