Twitter Announces Launch of New Audio Tweets Feature

For all the people, wherever they are, who were asking for the ability to share audio tweets, your day has finally come. Assuming you're on iOS, of course.

June 17, 2020

Audio tweets are about to be a thing.

In fact, for select iOS users, voice-tweeting in 140-second increments is already an option as of Wednesday.

In a statement announcing the new feature, Twitter's staff product designer Maya Patterson and senior software engineer Rémy Bourgoin said the idea started with the thought that perhaps 280 characters is sometimes not enough to get the message across, not to mention "conversational nuances are lost in translation."

To use the feature, simply open Twitter and tap on the wavelengths icon. From there, tap the record button to begin capturing 140 seconds of audio. If you go over that time limit, the recording will continue while breaking up the audio into separate tweets that can be shared as a thread.

"There's a lot that can be left unsaid or uninterpreted using text, so we hope voice tweeting will create a more human experience for listeners and storytellers alike," Patterson and Bourgoin said on Wednesday.

For now, the feature is available for a limited group of iOS users with plans to roll it out for all iOS users in the coming weeks. And is often the case with the rollout of a new Twitter feature, the reaction thus far has been decidedly divided: