Telegram adds automatically generated video transcripts, but only for Premium subscribers

Telegram continues its series of innovations reserved for Premium users with support for automatically generated video transcripts. So if the conversation partner or celebrity you’re following on Telegram chooses to post a video clip instead of a text message, you’ll be able to find out what it’s about without wasting time watching it by fast-forwarding through the transcript.

Telegram has built its reputation on the security of its instant messaging sessions, protected using cryptographic algorithms that some of the world’s governments have had nothing but “praise” for. But as Telegram could not remain a text-only platform forever, the addition of video messaging support has complicated the administration of the messaging service quite a bit, moving almost overnight to an operating model that requires considerably more effort on the technical support side.

Constrained rather by the imperative need to remain profitable in the context of an increasingly varied offering of facilities, costly to implement and support, Telegram introduced the Premium subscription. Inevitably, much of the effort to continue to bring innovation further motivated by the need to justify the fee charged to Premium subscribers, i.e. attract as many users as possible.

Whether you’re in a place too noisy to hear your phone, or conversely, anyone could hear you replying to a video message, the transcription feature could offer the perfect alternative, moving the conversation back to text form.

However, it’s easy to anticipate that the transcription feature won’t work as well in video call chat sessions with multiple participants. The main obstacle would be isolating and tagging individual speakers in the context of a conversation where the participants are heard in the same audio stream.

Trying to bring more order to the topics discussed, Telegram also introduces the Topics feature, allowing chat group administrators to identify the discussion being held with a specific topic (e.g. gastronomy, sports).