LAHORE: WhatsApp has announced that it has made private and secure one-to-one voice and video calls available on its desktop app.

According to a blog on WhatsApp’s official website, the company says: “Throughout the last year we’ve seen significant increases in people calling one another on WhatsApp, often for long conversations. Last New Year’s Eve, we broke the record for the most calls ever made in a single day with 1.4 billion voice and video calls. With so many people still apart from their loved ones, and adjusting to new ways of working, we want conversations on WhatsApp to feel as close to in-person as possible, regardless of where you are in the world or the tech you are using.

“Answering on a bigger screen makes it easier to work with colleagues, see your family more clearly on a bigger canvas, or free up your hands to move around a room while talking. To make desktop calling more useful, it has been made sure it works seamlessly for both portrait and landscape orientation, appears in a resizable standalone window on your computer screen, and is set to be always on top so users never lose video chats in a browser tab or stack of open windows.”

The feature is starting with one-to-one calls on the WhatsApp desktop app to make sure users get a reliable and high-quality experience, the company said. The feature will be expanding to include group voice and video calls in the future.

Published in Dawn, March 6th, 2021