Telegram to upgrade Voice Chat feature with video calling functionality

In what is clearly an attempt to take on popular players like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet, the app’s creator announced on Telegram that the Voice Chat feature would soon be improved with the addition of video capabilities.

The Telegram Messenger app on an iPhone. (Bloomberg)

The past few weeks seem to have kept the developers at Telegram quite busy, with multiple new features like payments and scheduled voice chats announced recently and more in the pipeline, the company seems hard at work adding new features to what many users consider the swiss army knife of messaging apps. The app's founder has now announced plans to improve its Voice Chats feature by adding video support.

In what is clearly an attempt to take on popular players like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet, the app's creator announced on Telegram that the Voice Chat feature would soon be improved with the addition of video capabilities. What is interesting is that Durov suggests that the feature would be added on top of the Voice Chats feature, which means that users would be able to simply start their video on a voice chat once the feature rolls out.

Telegram may need to rethink the choice of the name Voice Chats once the features roll out, though. That's because Durov says the video features will allow for group video calls as well as screen sharing. Settings that are likely to arrive could control noise cancellation, improved encryption, desktop and tablet support – the founder goes as far as to call it a modern video conferencing tool.

We had previously reported that Telegram had added support for two new web apps, one of them is expected to replace the old and outdated web client. According to Durov this video calling functionality could also make its way to the company's web app. This might also encourage companies to start adopting the service for collaboration, as Telegram users tend to use the service on both their computers as well as their devices.