Facebook Announces India-Specific Features Including Voice Posts, Save Stories And More

Facebook has announced a new update recently which will bring additional features to its ‘Stories’ along with an option for its users to share audio posts on the social media platform. The Stories centric feature work much like the ones seen on the Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform Instagram. The updates announced by the social media giant include a save Stories option, Voice posts and even a Stories archive to let its users keep their Facebook Stories for the future. As per Facebook, the new updates will be rolled out to its Indian users in the coming weeks. Here is a look at what’s new on Facebook’s plate this time.

Save Photos and Videos for later

Facebook users will now be able to save the photos and videos they capture through the Facebook camera, where only they can see them when they log into their Facebook account. This allows people to save the photos and videos they capture without taking up space on their phone. It can also be used to save photos which users might want to share later.

Facebook says that a research conducted by the company revealed that many people have to delete a photo from their phone before they’re able to take a new one. To avoid this, Facebook will be rolling out the save stories feature on Facebook app for Android devices. The company has not announced the arrival of the update on iOS or FB Lite.

Voice Posts

As per Facebook, a lot of people connect through audio. In fact, people were using creative workarounds to share through audio already by covering their phone camera with their finger when taking a video and just recording the audio to share. The new update by Facebook includes ‘Voice posts’ which lets users share audio in the moment without having to share a photo or video. This could also help people who can’t necessarily write in the language they want to share in.

Facebook claims that the voice post feature is ‘optimized for low data/network conditions’. A voice post on Stories is limited to a duration of 20 seconds. There is, however, currently no limit for a voice post that is shared to News Feed, but the recording time is restricted by the local storage on the user’s device.

Voice post feature will currently be rolled out on FBLite only.

Stories Archive

In addition to the Save Stories feature, Facebook will also be rolling out ‘Stories Archive’ which will allow Facebook users to save their shared Stories on the platform for the future. As per Facebook, the feature will allow users to save Stories that contain ‘special moments worth saving’ in an archive for viewing anytime in the future, unlike the normal Stories that disappear within 24 hours from an account.

Facebook will also allow users to reshare Stories kept in archive either as a post or in the Stories format. To archive Stories, users must have auto-archive enabled.

The announcement for the upcoming updates was made by Connor Hayes, Director of Product Management on the Facebook Stories team. As per the announcement, the new featuers will be rolled out in the coming few weeks.