Posting Voice Notes publicly on X may no longer be possible, but you can now share audio messages within X’s direct messaging system, X Chat, once again. The social network announced late on Wednesday that support for Voice Notes is now available within its private messaging service.
The feature, which works in both one-on-one messages and group chats, is activated with a push of the voice input icon to the right of the chat’s text box. At launch, you have to continue to press the button to record the voice message, but we found that a press-and-hold gesture followed by a swipe up allows it to record without having to keep your finger on the button.
The new addition could make X Chat more competitive with other messaging apps, where recording audio voice notes has long been a standard option. This is particularly important to the company, given the recent spinout of X Chat as its own stand-alone app.
It could also assuage angry users who didn’t appreciate that the upgrade to X Chat removed the Voice Notes feature.
The move follows X’s recent beta tests of an X Chat app on iOS, which offers access to X’s upgraded DM feature. While the company claims that chats are end-to-end encrypted, security experts have warned that the service is less secure than other encrypted messaging apps, like Signal.
The introduction of the new app reflects a strategy change for the social network, as owner Elon Musk once said X would become an all-in-one super app, or “everything app.” Now, the company is looking to make pieces of its app available as their own experiences. X Money, X’s payments service, is also being tested as a separate app, for instance.
Voice Notes have been on X Chat’s roadmap for some time despite their temporary removal. When X first introduced its new chat platform in November, it said the audio feature would be “returning soon.”
Currently, the X Chat service also supports other features, like the ability to edit and delete messages, block or get notified of screenshots, share files, make voice and video calls, and set messages to automatically disappear.