Last August, the feature of voice recordings was first spotted, anyhow, Twitter has now officially launched a full live test of voice recordings within direct messages to users in Brazil, Japan, and India.

Twitter’s Voice Recordings in DMS 2021:

🎤test,🎤test: Starting today, you'll be able to record and send voice messages in DMs 😉 Here’s how👇

PS. The experiment will be rolled out in phases. pic.twitter.com/aqQM6h9sof

— Twitter India (@TwitterIndia) February 17, 2021

As you can see above, the process enables users to record an audio clip and it can then be sent as a message. It’s basically an extension of the audio recording option Twitter added to regular tweets last June, which launched to some hype, with celebrities along with high-profile users sending out voice recordings. Since then, however, it looks to have died out to a degree, with fewer audio clips being presented over time.

You can Tweet a Tweet. But now you can Tweet your voice!

Rolling out today on iOS, you can now record and Tweet with audio. pic.twitter.com/jezRmh1dkD

— Twitter (@Twitter) June 17, 2020

But voice recordings in DMs could actually help a different purpose, also become a more important option. A key benefit of adding voice recordings is that it opens Twitter up to more people of different capacities, and in this respect, audio tweets have definitely added more ways for vision-impaired users to engage with Tweet content.

Moreover, Twitter has been working to improve the accessibility of the platform, which has seen it announce a range of new initiatives over the past year. Audio DMs could be seen as another element in this push – on the other side, they could also help to reduce language barriers in multi-lingual regions, because it can sometimes be easier to speak a language than it is to write it.

Or it could just add another entertainment element to your DMs. Audio content is having a moment, with the growth of audio social network Clubhouse sparking different clone functionalities among the big platforms. Audio DMs might also be a method to tap into this trend – even though as noted, there are important, practical uses for the same.

Talking more about Twitter’s voice recordings, there could also be brand usage considerations, with ways to record fun or informational audio clips that can be used to reply to common customer queries.

Additionally, in terms of technical limitations, voice recordings in DMs can be up to 140-seconds long, the same as voice tweets, on the other side, the functionality is currently only available on iOS. Twitter says that voice tweets will be coming to Android and the web later this year.

However, there is no word as yet on a broader roll-out of audio DMs to more regions.