Facebook Inc (FB) May Soon Debut Messenger Voicemail Transcriptions

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) may soon debut a voicemail transcription service through Messenger, a report from Engadget indicates.

The news about this new Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) Messenger feature comes from a post made by David Marcus, the former PayPal employee who now runs Messenger for the social media giant.

“We’re always working on ways to make Messenger more useful. As many of you know, we already offer a feature that enables people to send voice clips to their friends without having to type out the text. Today we are starting to roll out a small test that helps people read the voice clips they receive instead of having to play them out loud,” Marcus wrote on his timeline this Saturday.

As Marcus mentioned, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s Messenger already has the ability to send people voice clips. This feature was debuted by the world’s largest social networking site on January 2013.

With voice transcriptions, users of Messenger can opt to read their voice messages when it’s more convenient for them to do so, say like when they are in a meeting or in a loud and live event like a concert.

Marcus said that this is still a “small test we’re rolling out” so not many users of Messenger can try this new Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) feature now.

Nonetheless, the Facebook engineer said that their plan is to test the new voicemail transcription feature at a tiny scale for now and judging on the feedback that they will gather, there’s a possibility that the experience will be made “more widely available.”

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has a similar voice transcription feature for Google Voice.

John Burbank’s Passport Capital owned about 1.05 million Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) shares by the end of the third quarter of 2014. Worth about $85.35 million then, the stake is a massive 373% increase in Passport Capital’s stake in the social media giant compared to their stake in 2Q2014. The shares in Facebook make up 1.17% of Passport Capital’s whole portfolio.