WhatsApp Will Have Voice Communication

Today Jan Koum, the CEO of WhatsApp — acquired by Facebook last week for $19 billion — delivered another news bomb on top of last week’s milestone: he announced that the messaging giant is finally moving into voice — a move announced at MWC, the conference for mobile carriers that apps like WhatsApp are squarely disrupting.
According to the company CEO Jan Koum, the company is adding voice communication to its service by summer. The news should give a hard time to competitors like Viber, Line and BBM, that offer a similar service. Perhaps, the company want’s to make sure that the 465 million user base (yes, it’s grown by 15 million since last week) sticks to the service, so that Facebook may not end up regretting its decision to purchase the company, unlike some other acquisitions in history.
The service will first be brought to Android and iOS, followed by ‘some Nokia’ (is that what they call Windows Phone now?) and BlackBerry phones. Also, it happens to be WhatsApp’s fourth birthday today, so we can only imagine that the users have been given a pleasant gift to mark the occasion. How the service will work isn’t exactly known. It could be like the VoIP service that Skype and Viber offer, or it could also follow Skype’s approach of allowing users to make calls over the internet to telephone numbers in exchange for a payment. We’ll know more in the coming days.
Source: cnet

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