Can another messaging app survive in the land of WeChat?
Smartisan’s Bullet Messaging has a long way to go before it reaches WeChat’s 1 billion users
WeChat has over a billion users and is virtually indispensable in China. But in the past week, for the first time in a long time, Chinese internet users have shown interest in a new messaging app.
The most talked-about function on Bullet Messaging is that it can translate your voice message to text as you’re sending it. You don’t even need to open a specific chat window to start dictating your message in the app.
It may not seem like a big technical breakthrough, but it’s a meaningful change for China’s smartphone users.
We need to back up here a little. Using voice messages was originally what drew users to WeChat from the formerly dominant QQ (incidentally, both are products of Tencent, and QQ now supports voice messages). But WeChat’s voice messages have become an unpleasant experience for many users, especially in the workplace.
WeChat doesn’t allow you to pause a voice message or drag and jump to a certain point, which means if you miss one important word during a 60-second message, you have to listen to the whole thing all over again. Also, it takes longer to get information from a voice message than looking at text, and you can’t search for the content of a voice message.