WhatsApp to get voice calling in Q2 this year

Following its acquisition by Facebook for $19 billion , WhatsApp is about to take its first major evolutionary step. The popular cross platform messaging app will be getting a voice calling feature come Q2 of 2014. The messaging app which has been the centre of the world’s attention turned five today.

With the Mobile World Congress playing as the backdrop, WhatsApp’s CEO, Jan Koum has announced that the service will be adding a voice service to the app soon. “We are going to introduce voice in WhatsApp in the second quarter of this year,” he said. It’s interesting to note that the announcement’s come not only a few days after Facebook acquired WhatsApp but also on the service’s and Koum’s birthday.

Koum also announced that WhatsApp had now crossed 465 million monthly active users, a pretty impressive post-acquisition figure. There are also 330 million daily active users,a  15 million jump from the figures released just before Facebook acquired the service.

The CEO stressed on the need for WhatsApp to grow steadily while keeping competition at bay. TechCrunc h has reported that WhatsApp first aims to bring Voice to Android and iOS first, followed by some Nokia and BlackBerry phones. Koum also stressed on the fact that there will be no planned changes to WhatsApp post Facebook’s acquisition; at least not yet. He said that there are still no plans of marketing and the company would continue doing service the way it has always done.

Both Koum and the WhatsApp team seem to be unperturbed on the service’s fifth birthday, despite having faced the biggest outag e in the company’s history over the weekend. The service went down for a good three hours on Saturday following a network router outage, something that reportedly earned rival service Telegram 4.95 million followers.

(With inputs from agencies)