WhatsApp added screen sharing with audio support and a new speaker spotlight feature on Thursday, improving the video calling experience across all devices. Additionally, it is raising the maximum number of participants in video calls to 32.
WhatsApp added screen-sharing functionality for video calls in August of last year. With the addition of audio sharing capabilities to the screen sharing feature, the instant messaging app has improved user experience. You can use this to watch videos over a WhatsApp call with your contacts.
The increased limit, which enables users to have up to 32 individuals on a single video conversation across devices, is the other big update that WhatsApp introduced to its video calling feature. Prior to this upgrade, users could add up to 32 participants on mobile devices and up to 8 participants on Windows and macOS, respectively.
WhatsApp now supports video calls on more devices, matching Apple FaceTime, which also lets users of iPhones and iPads have up to 32 participants in a video session. Nonetheless, even with the basic plan, customers of Zoom and Google Meet can have up to 100 participants.
The speaker spotlight feature, which was added to WhatsApp with the most recent upgrades, allows the person speaking on a video conversation to be automatically highlighted and shown first on the screen.
Furthermore, Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, released the Meta Low Bitrate (MLow) codec for the messaging app to enhance call dependability regardless of the user’s device or network quality. It is a major improvement over the open source codec Opus that Meta had previously used in all of its real-time communication products. With 10% less computational complexity than the open source codec, the proprietary codec is rated to provide twice the audio quality of Opus.
To improve the calling experience across Meta platforms, MLow is now rolling out on WhatsApp in addition to being accessible on Instagram and Messenger calls.
